June 2023 Status Update
AI has the potential to take us much closer to our vision of empowering everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content. Smart Import is the first in a line of AI powered products. It helps create interactive content much faster so that our learners may enjoy more and better interactive content. It turns static content into interactive content increasing engagement, recollection and understanding.
The world of AI is moving very quickly. We are dedicating more and more resources to ensure we stay on top of the developments and identify the best possible ways to leverage AI to help content creators around the world achieve their goals.
For those of us hosting H5P ourselves the AI tools will initially be less available as it is part of H5P.com and uses tools and technologies that are not possible to self host. We are considering making it possible to subscribe to them from a self hosted plugin in the future. Initially those of us who self host and would like to use Smart Import would either shift to using H5P via LTI from H5P.com or create the content on H5P.com and download it as an .h5p file. The .h5p file can then be uploaded to the self hosted H5P server.
Survey results
We gained valuable insight from our recent community survey. The responses gave me a better understanding of our experiences and expectations with H5P.
These were the top areas the respondents wanted to prioritize:
- Improvements to the editor experience.
- New content types.
- Design enhancements to benefit end users.
- Improvements to existing content types.
1, 3 and 4 will receive greater attention going forward. New content types are always fun and we will keep them coming too, but adding more makes it harder to achieve improved user experiences for both authors and students on the existing ones.
Additionally, several common irritations with H5P were identified:
- A need for consistency among content types from an authoring perspective.
- Slow response times on feature requests and pull requests.
- The desire to theme without writing CSS, and for greater text formatting options.
The Core Team will prioritise the editing experience going forward, and consistency will be key. The Core Team is also growing and are considering to add maintainers who are not H5P Group employees as well to speed up the handing of feature requests and pull requests. The Core Team is also working on a new theme that will be configurable.
From the textual responses, some requests featured prominently:
- Improvements in accessibility.
- More content options for "container content types," such as adding more question types to the Interactive Book.
- An enhancement of xAPI coverage.
- The introduction of an exam mode.
- Updating the Moodle plugin, which we are pleased to announce has been completed!
- Some of you found the sheer number of content types overwhelming and requested a PowerPoint import feature.
Please know that every piece of feedback is being taken into consideration as H5P's roadmap continue to be refined. The involvement and insight from all of us in the community are vital to improving and evolving the H5P user experience.
