Adam Gacs and Shannon Quinn, instructors in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, have been part of a community of language teachers that have been using H5P for years. H5P, an application that allows faculty and curriculum designers to easily create innovative and interactive online activities, has been used in their courses since approximately 2016, but until recently, they were unable to keep track of what their students did with the activities.
“H5P has some of the most flexible and engaging activity types available,” Shannon Quinn said. “But I couldn’t get feedback directly about what my students had done.”
That is about to change, as Adam and Shannon recently learned that they received a Catalyst Innovation Award from the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation for their project “Interactive and Adaptive Online Activities with H5P: Expanding Access to Interactive Learning Experiences Inside a Familiar LMS”. This project joins a previous pilot program that aims to provide accounts for instructors that allow them to create H5P activities in D2L, MSU’s course management system. With a plethora of activity types available (over 30 types, including interactive video, branching scenario, interactive slideshow, and many others), as well as drill-down reports that show instructors details about how students have interacted with the materials, instructors’ ability to meaningfully react to students’ needs will dramatically increase.
“Standing in the way of creating more H5P activities for me has been reliable hosting and a lack of analytics about content types. We are thankful for Dustin DeFelice and the English Language Center’s support of co-paid author accounts in previous years,” said Adam.
Adam and Shannon have been advocating for H5P to be added directly as a Learning Tool to D2L ever since it became an option through H5P.com to enable a tight integration into the familiar LMS by allowing activity creation and storage and basic score reporting natively.
“This convenient feature reduces the effort required by faculty to easily share and track activities they create for engaging their students prior to class or as a robust formative assessment tool that can be used without leaving the D2L environment,” Adam said.
Adam and Shannon plan to offer accounts and reporting capabilities to as many instructors as possible, hoping to build excitement and offer dedicated support for this powerful tool on the campus. They will also plan to offer training sessions for those interested in using the tool and hope to organize a learning community where teachers can share ideas and best practices that they learn during the pilot program.
“We hope that many language faculty as well as instructors from other disciplines will embrace this powerful new tool for creating engaging content,” Shannon said.
