The Irrepressible Architecture of H5P

Submitted by tim on Thu, 11/10/2016 - 17:09

Interactive content on the web is broken because almost all content that is created is ‘locked in’ to a particular platform or authoring tool. 

If an organization can afford it, migrating interactive content between platforms is arduous and expensive. In most cases, the content is abandoned and the creators have to start from scratch.

Imagine the quality of learning material that can be created if content creators knew that the content they’ve made will always be accessible no matter the platform. 

H5P was designed from the ground up to make sure that your content is easily exportable and not locked in. H5P guarantees this by being: 

  1. Integrated into different publishing systems. You can create content in WordPress, easily move it to Moodle and continue editing it there or in any other H5P enabled publishing platform. Your content is not at risk of disappearing just because the platform it is hosted on disappears. Integrations are key to making H5P platform-agnostic and many more are planned for the future.
  2. Open Source. H5P software is open and free, licensed primarily with MIT licenses -one of the most open and safest licenses there is. What isn’t MIT licensed is GPL licensed. This means that nobody can start to suddenly charge money for you to continue using H5P or continue to have access to your content and the tools you need to maintain them.  And anyone can maintain the tools as well.
  3. Designed to separate content from style and logic. The data of H5P content is stored in the very open and widespread json format, clearly separated from the styling and logic that is used to display it. Each H5P content type requires that the json has a specific structure. This structure is very well documented per content type in files called semantics.json. This means that the content can easily be rendered by different tools. Anyone can make an alternative Quiz viewer and/or authoring tool that can display and edit content created with today’s H5P Quiz. I hope nobody will ever have any reason to replace the H5P software to use their content, but it is very easy to do this when the content is created with H5P.

 

 What you create with H5P is yours forever.