Our journey with H5P: the story of a library and its eLearning adventures

Abstract

Monash University Library has embraced H5P as a preferred development tool for a number of eLearning initiatives. One of the main reasons for this is because H5P activities can easily be embedded on various platforms. These platforms include the university’s learning management system (Moodle); the library’s resource guides (LibGuides), and the university’s content management system (Squiz). A large number of H5P activities have been used to create, amongst other things, a public facing student online learning resource, a staff professional development program, and an interactive educational design tool.

H5P was adopted by Monash University Library staff not long after its inception. The number of active content creators and H5P activities created have increased rapidly and steadily since then. This uptake is largely due to H5P’s ease of use and modularity. Activity within the H5P library community is optimised by using WordPress as the H5P hosting platform, as it has enabled content creators to access others’ activities and manage all the content in one location. This sharing and transparency facilitates the sharing of ideas and resources and is a vehicle to stimulate creativity.

Through projects and increased experience with H5P, content creators have come up with creative ‘workarounds’ to make H5P activities more versatile. The content creators have also helped identify areas for improvement which lead to collaborative development work with H5P.org that eventually benefitted the entire user community.

The journey with H5P continues. While more activities are being created, the library hopes to take a more systematic approach to manage the ongoing use and maintenance of H5P content, to develop new partnerships that inspire and encourage creativity in the library and beyond.