Making Small Changes To My Course – Part 2: H5P Interactions
By Natasha May
Hello, it’s me again, Natasha May, back for part 2 of the blog post from a previous week, “Making Small Changes to My Course – Part 1: An Alternative Assessment.” As you may know from my previous post, over the summer I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to teach a course that I taught a few years before, MATH 1090: Introduction to Logic for Computer Science. I was excited to try some new things based on lessons learned over the year teaching remotely and new resources by the Teaching Commons.
This is part two of a two-part blog post, and is about using H5P to add Interactions to existing videos
The flipped classroom is an instructional strategy where students learn content on their own through readings, or audio/video material, and class time is spent more actively by applying what is learned through problem solving, discussions, and other activities. I believe in the flipped classroom method because I want the students to be able to apply what they’re learning in the class with support instead of listening to a lecture, and being left on their own to figure out how to apply what was covered in the lecture. Having taught the course, MATH 1090, using the flipped classroom method in the past, I already had videos to draw on that I didn’t have to create, so I was finally able to add to these videos to improve the support for students. Since it had been a while since I last taught the course, new tools were available this time! In the past, I relied on students posting a question, or writing a summary of what they learned from the videos (or reading) to demonstrate that they completed the pre-class work. This was time consuming to go through to get a sense of what students did and did not understand to provide support. If I ever had a chance to teach the course again, I planned to use self-grading quizzes to help me assess students’ understanding. Having used H5P to create interactive videos in another course I taught the previous summer, I chose to explore whether I could use H5P to embed the interactions, that is, quiz type questions, into these pre-recorded videos. I spent my time reviewing the previously created videos to make sure they were still applicable and tried to determine where interactions could be incorporated. Not wanting to listen to my own voice, I relied on muting the videos and reading the closed captioning, phew! Once I found the places in the videos where a question could be imported, and discovered the upgrade to H5P had also increased the types of questions that could be embedded, I had fun creating questions. The pause feature in H5P made it seamless to embed new questions into the videos that were not originally planned. H5P enabled students to answer quiz type questions within the videos to determine how well they understood the material, and make decisions about whether they want to re-watch part of the video or check their answers and try again. They had unlimited tries to answer the question because the point of the videos and questions was learning, not an assessment of learning outcomes.
What I don’t know is how accessible H5P is. I didn’t have any questions from students related to difficulty using the technology. What I am wondering about though, is how well screen readers interact with this tool. I’m also mindful of the Universal Design for Learning principle, multiple means of representation, where content is available in multiple forms like visual and audio. In videos that are created with specific interaction in mind I would give an audio description in addition to the visual in the video of a question for students to answer. This wouldn’t make the interactions themselves accessible, but at least students had access to listen to the question and could think about their answer. I also include audio along with the visual take-up of the question when this is planned in the video. When embedding questions into my existing videos there is no audio description from me in the video, and although the students receive feedback, can check their answers, and hence access a take-up of the question, an audio take-up is not provided, so the existing videos with interaction embedded are less accessible.
An alternative to adding interactions without re-recording, or editing the videos, is to add an eClass quiz after the videos, incorporating the same questions I embedded in the videos through H5P. Again, I don’t know how accessible eClass quizzes are. That is, how well screen readers can read them. Alternatives may have to be offered for those that need them. Moreover, eClass quizzes are visual, and I do not believe there is a way to add an audio component.
The only other difficulty I encountered with H5P is the content bank, where H5P products are created. The content bank is unique for every eClass course you have, but you can import content banks from existing eClass courses. The tricky part I encountered was that I could only edit the originally created video, not any videos from an imported content bank. This got tricky when technical issues arose with the submission screen disappearing (that I cannot explain, but could fix) and I had to edit the videos. There were two sections of MATH 1090, and I shared the interactive videos I created with the other section, through a Playground course both instructors had access to. Importing from a content bank in the playground course posed an issue when needing to edit videos to fix technical issues. I discovered an H5P feature that solved this issue for me, use the copy button and then paste and replace into an interactive video created in another content bank. This way, I only had to fix the issue once, and then copy and paste and replace into the content bank of the other course. I suppose I could have re-imported the content bank, but I was worried how this might affect other videos, so it felt safer to me to copy and paste and replace.
Another mistake I made when embedding H5P interactive videos into eClass from the content bank was that I didn’t read the eClass instructions indicating different options for embedding into an eClass course. The option “create an alias/shortcut to the file” means any changes will be automatically applied, while the option “make a copy of the file” simply embeds a copy of the file at the time of embedding, and no edits are applied. The default at the time, I think, was “make a copy of the file” and since I didn’t pay attention to these options, when I updated the file in the content bank, I had to re-add the file to the eClass page so the update would be applied. Luckily, now it seems that “link to the file” is the default so that changes should be updated automatically under this default option.
I know many if not all of you have more experience with H5P, so feel free to share your own tips and tricks too!
About the Author
Natasha May is an Educational Developer in the Teaching Commons. Her portfolio includes curriculum development at the program and course level, student transition and retention, as well as support for teaching assistants. She is also a member of the leadership team for the York Capstone Network. Her educational development philosophy is to take a practitioner approach and so she values opportunities to teach in her discipline, mathematics, and uses experience to guide the support she offers. She is grateful to be the liaison for the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design, Osgoode Hall Law School, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Being part of these communities is truly a privilege.