We hooked up eFront with a great content creation toolset, and to the even greater community behind it, opening up eFront users to H5P content creation, and H5P developers to a leading enterprise training platform.
A Quick Reminder On H5P
A quick reminder for the perplexed: H5P is a free open-source standard (plus a framework and a set of tools for working with it), with which you can create, share and reuse interactive multimedia content for desktop and mobile platforms.
And as for us, eFront added support for H5P back in version 4.4, and will have even stronger support in version 5.
Now Onto Our Norwegian expedition
Well, now that you’re up to speed, in early September we finally had the chance to travel to Norway for the H5P Conference and get up close and personal with the community. And, though we’d have loved to stay and enjoy the Nordic hospitality some more, we are now back home to dutifully report on all the wonderful H5P-related developments we’ve seen.
The Lowdown
Besides the core H5P team who organized the whole thing (and who were all passionate about the project and for the future of the platform), we met a great many passionate people at the Conference — developers, designers, students and UX people from all around the world that work with H5P and contribute to the project.
The H5P community has expanded pretty quickly, attracting developers and designers from all around the world, and having businesses and organizations of all sizes, as well as numerous universities, using it.
The conference lasted 3 days (September 11 to 13). During the intense 3-day training, we learned how to create rich interactive content, studied the platform’s unique features and best practices, met professionals from different parts of the world, and did a little mingling and networking.
We also had the opportunity to participate in the H5P Hackathon, where we were split into small teams and were able to build H5P content types and example content, as well as documentation and translations based on what we wanted for H5P.org. The H5P Core team members joined as well. This was interesting and highly rewarding for everyone.
Especially insightful was learning about H5P accessibility capabilities, and how people with disabilities (e.g. visually impaired individuals) can still use H5P to explore a world of information and interactions — as long as the content developers follow a few simple accessibility practices. The community has already added accessibility annotations to most of the H5P content types and has announced WCAG 2.0 AA conformance as a stated goal.
Also inspiring were the success stories from people who have used H5P in many different ways — from creating a crossword to experimenting with interactive learning techniques in a pedagogical research setting.
Even more good news (and a validation of our decision to adopt H5P in eFront) is that the community is rapidly expanding and co-operating with well-respected universities such as MIT and the University of Nevada.
The H5P in eFront
Our team has been busy revamping eFront’s H5P integration, making it much more powerful and adding extensive xAPI reporting options. And while this is under development still, we do hope to launch it with the upcoming platform update.
Of course you don’t have to wait until then to try out H5P! If you haven’t already taken advantage of eFront’s H5P integration in your training courses, then you should definitely give it a try – just log into your portal or create a free demo account and see for yourself! We are sure that you’ll agree with us that it’s one of the best options available today for rich and interactive training experiences.
Conclusion
All in all, we had a great time in Norway and at the H5P Conference, met some great people, made many new friends, and saw lots of impressive H5P-based applications and content created by the community.
Our thanks to Tromsø, Norway for the warm hospitality (and cold Smørrebrød), and to the H5P Core Team for a great conference experience.