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Re: Anyone heard of H5P?
by Simon Date - Wednesday, 29 March 2017, 2:29 PM
 

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