Adapt Learning Community: Anyone heard of H5P?

Hi,

In my last job, I worked as an Instructional deisgner/elearning developer for Victoria University (VU). I'm aware that Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate are the industry standards. However, VU uses the e-learning software known as 'H5P', as it's free, an open source and easy to use. The program is created for non designers, just like if you don't now coding to build a website, there's wordpress. H5P also has plug ins with wordpress, Drupal and moodle.

Links:

https://h5p.org/
https://h5p.org/presentation (the format VU use)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5P

I'm in Australia, I've done keyword research of "H5P" on job sites with no results at all. Obviously, we all know majority of the companies and organisations requires Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Lectora and etc. (In my opinion, comparing H5P to Articulate Storyline is like comparing Microsoft Paint to Photoshop)

So my question is, if you were the employer and you see my resume that I have e-learning and instructional design experience, but the software I use is H5P, would I have the chance to get hired? Would you hire someone who uses a software that you might/may never heard of?

Hi Imran,

I don’t think H5P should be the focus of how you sell yourself. (By the way, where is Adapt in your story?)

I suggest that you put yourself in the shoes of the type of employer that you would like to work for. What positions would they have available? Would the job roles be specialized or would they be looking for generalists? Your questions focus on the value of H5P. I have looked at your experience on LinkedIn. It emphasizes graphics. Even with your most recent position, it feels like half of your responsibilities was tech, not instructional design. It does not present you as someone who is educated as an instructional designer and who has been working toward a career in eLearning. It presents you as a graphics designer who recently got a job that exposed you to the breadth of eLearning. And in that seven months you had some decent experiences in instructional design. You may have finally found your calling, but you have to consider how you stack up against your competition.

I have never been in the position of hiring instructional designers, yet I know that ID positions are competitive for those who have educational degrees in the field and have focused job experience. At least that’s the case in and around Chicago. In my region, if I were a large employer who had a department dedicated to eLearning and I were looking for an instructional designer, your resume would have a tough time attracting my attention. You could not compete for instructional design positions on the strength of your resume alone. You’d have to find a way to attract my attention and prove your worth in a way that did not rely on your resume. Your use of H5P would not be a factor because building courses would not be a part of your job description as an instructional designer.

In my region, you could prove your value to my organization as a graphics artist or better as an art director precisely because you’ve had seven months exposure to the breadth of eLearning. That ID experience would set you apart from other designers. Your use of H5P would demonstrate you know firsthand how graphics get used in authoring tools.

If I were hiring for a smaller company who could not dedicate many staff to eLearning, your resume might attract me. If our eLearning roles and workflows were not so differentiated, someone who has proven himself in instructional design, in LMS admin, and in graphics design and UX might be a true asset. I could rely on you to do it all—everything it takes to produce and deliver an eLearning course. But again, H5P would’t be the deciding factor for me. It would be suitability of your overall skills. If I needed you to be ID, graphics, and course builder, I’d give you the chance to prove how quickly you could learn Storyline.

My comments are intended to be a discussion of strategy, not an assessment of your potential for success. There are many paths to a successful career. I myself entered eLearning from a funny angle. Make sure you get Adapt on your resume. I hope something above was helpful. Employment issues can be regionally specific. It would be good to hear opinions from Australians.

Chuck Lorenz

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Hi Chuck,

Thank you for your response and what you have provided is eye-opening and insightful about ID. I haven't use Adapt before so that's why I came to this forum to find out other's opinions about H5P.

I was struggling to find a job in design then my lecturer contacted for an e-learning job, with my background in Graphic and UX Design, I got the job. I had no idea about e-learning before and learned everything on the job including H5P as that’s the program they use. The funny thing, I assumed that Instructional Design and learning designer were the same, only to find out later they were never the same, silly me.

While working on the job, I wondered why the university uses H5P but not industry standard like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Adapt Learning and etc.; with very minimal experience and knowledge of the e-learning industry it concerns me on how H5P is looked upon by potential employers as it is a low-end authoring tool. To be honest I felt lousy as the majority of the time as I simply copy and paste repetitively; I copied the information from the PowerPoint modules and pasted into H5P, design some graphics and upload the graphics into H5P and create template-based interactive quiz, which I feel that my work seem amateurish. It may seem competent to the lecturer (client/employer) as he gave the design direction; but to future employers who are actually in the e-learning industry how would it be perceived?

That’s why I worried and wonder if my H5P experience and folio would lead me to anywhere.

Have a look: https://h5p.org/presentation
Examples of my work: http://www.imranzdesign.com.au/index.php/victoria-university/

H5P is designed for non-designers, just like Wordpress that is a template-based system for a person who doesn’t know and web coding/design. That’s why I said that comparing H5P to Articulate Storyline, is like comparing Microsoft Paint to Photoshop. Due to H5P’s limitations, it makes my work look amateur.

Although, you’re right about the job and H5P did expose me to design for blended learning, and least it gave me some idea about instructional design. Fortunately, the experience gave me some direction about my future career in ID, so to expand my skills and moving beyond design; last week I just enrolled in a teaching course of “Certificate IV in Training & Assessment” a qualification to teach in adult education, pedagogy and instructional design.

Cracking my next job, will be a challenge…

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Hi Imran,

I'm based in Melbourne, Australia and would be happy to catch up and give you some advice. My wife has also been employed as a lecturer/tutor for many years VU so I'm quite away of the environment there.

I'm working for a client this week in Footscray, if you want to catch up for a coffee let me know.

You can find my contact details on tysonpriddle.com

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Hi Imran,

My team uses H5P as well as Adapt, so I think I have some experience to talk about both technologies.

H5P is a really great tool that's one of it's best features is its offering of content types which are all being updated rapidly, by a dedicated full-time team based in Norway. It's best content type, Interactive Video has an equal amount or more of features compared to many premium interactive video authoring tools that are being sold for hundreds of dollars per month, a huge win for OSS.

We were so keen to bring some of the great activity types from H5P to Adapt that we created a component type that allows for H5P content to be embedded into Adapt with native Adapt functionality (component completion) built in, check it out here and please tell me what you think.

H5P recent native support Moodle plugin offers it a huge chance to gain huge popularity from people who want to easily create "better-than-Moodle" activities. However it is still not as fleshed out as the Wordpress and Drupal support. When we tested it about 3 months ago, was not really on the same level as the other platforms. Maybe it will achieve feature parity in 6-12 months. This meant that we instead have to create h5p content on our Drupal server and then embed it into our LMS. This workflow is quite a bit slower than our Adapt workflow, so problems there.

Another issue of having to load content externally is that we can't apply CSS from Moodle onto the H5P content. So the styling must be done from Drupal/Wordpress. You have to worry about giving high level permissions out to another platform and once they have access, talking to our web designers this is a horrible/slow process and nothing like the simplicity of theming a Adapt course, I think this is something to do with how each H5P content type is meant to be self-sufficent so must be styled accordingly. I noticed that from the examples you posted you have only made very basic CSS changes so I assume you have reached the same conclusion, we have open sourced our teams approach to working with H5P on Drupal, if any of that helps you.

Back to your original question, I think H5P will grow in popularity when it's h5p Moodle extension is stable. But as Chuck said I agree that you should be trying to expand your horizons beyond it. I see h5p as being the most basic AT in terms in theming. If you want to fill your portfolio with work that highlights your skills as a graphic and UX designer I would really recommend starting to use other tools like Adapt will allow you to create beautifully designed elearning courses that resemble more the best designed, professional websites rather than looking like legacy flash courses the incumbent authoring tools look like, with fixed screen sizes and low resolution images. Check out my favourite course from what's available from the Adapt Showcase.

Adapt requires you to know CSS to create these elearning courses. If you haven't touched it before there are some great guides on how to style on the Adapt Wiki. If you drop by on Gitter or ask question here I'm sure people will be happy to help you out. It may take a few days to get confident with but it will totally pay off to have CSS on your CV too.

If you are totally scared of ever writing CSS I suggest checking out some of the hosted version of Adapt that take this process like eLAT or Adapt Builder. Elucidat, Gomo and Evolve are some alternatives too.

Either way best of luck finding future work. If you want a change of scenery we are currently hiring ID's / content developers here in London. Send me a message if interested :)

Simon Date - King's College London

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