What is H5P?
  • 19 Mar 2024
  • 3 minutes to read

What is H5P?


Article Summary

The H5P activity allows you to author content directly into your courses with an easy-to-use library of editing and creation tools. Activities created in H5P are highly interactive and engaging for learners, and are compatible with Totara's course completion tracking. The H5P plugin provides an alternative and supplementary option to content authoring in your courses, meaning you can use these activities alongside other activities created in Totara.


As the H5P plugin is reliant on third-party functionality and external support, there are certain limitations and issues that cannot be addressed by Totara.

Totara is committed to providing a seamless and secure integration of H5P activities into our courses. As part of that commitment we're responsible for the following:

  • The workflow for adding H5P content in course activities
  • Configuration options and settings such as activity completion and appearance
  • How H5P authoring and activities are displayed in iframes in Totara courses
  • Enhanced security and automated testing, which reduces the chance of inadvertent impacts from system upgrades

H5P are responsible for the following:

  • Maintaining the library of activities and responding to feature requests
  • Addressing bugs with H5P activity behaviour
  • Accessibility, responsiveness and performance of activities

H5P.org and H5P.com both have large, active communities with a range of resources including documentation, tutorials, and user forums, meaning users that aren't already familiar with H5P can easily learn more.

Together Totara and H5P offer a powerful and flexible solution for creating engaging and interactive learning experiences.

H5P content is in English by default, but some content types have other languages available. See H5P's documentation on multilingual content for more information.
H5P collects anonymous statistical data on how H5P is used on a Totara site, and this information is used to improve the software and user experience. You can enable or disable the Contribute usage statistics setting via the H5P plugin settings.

Using existing H5P content

In earlier versions of Totara there was third-party support for H5P content, so some organisations may have already created H5P content for use on their site.

For a consistent experience, we recommend setting up any existing content using the H5P activity. You can do this by following these steps:

  1. Download your existing activities as .h5p files from h5p.org or the Totara site.
  2. Upload your activities into your Totara courses as required.

Completion tracking in H5P

H5P activities offer basic completion tracking, allowing you to verify that users have completed the required content. For most content types, this will be when the user clicks the Check button after completing an activity. Other activities will have specific completion requirements, such as the Course Presentation content type, which is marked as complete once the user reaches the final slide in the presentation.

See H5P's FAQ for more information on completion and scoring for different content types.

If you require more detailed completion tracking and reporting, you may want to use other Totara activities. For example, Totara's quiz activity provides more comprehensive tracking that will allow you to understand your learners' performance in more detail. Depending on the exact requirements of your course, you'll likely want to use a combination of H5P and Totara activities.

Accessibility

H5P content types aim for WCAG 2.1 AA support, but not all content types meet these criteria. H5P's content type documentation lists each content type and whether they are accessible.

It's important to note that H5P does not guarantee compliance with specific accessibility standards.

It's also important to note that the content of H5P activities needs to be designed with accessibility in mind. For example, while the Image Hotspots content type meets the accessibility criteria, the end user experience may not be accessible if you upload images with insufficient contrast ratios and graphical text that won't be detected by screen readers. Even when using content types that are considered accessible, you still need to ensure that you follow best-practice accessibility design principles, such as adding alt text where possible.

The H5P activity is compatible with the Totara Mobile app, but it's important to be aware of how the content will appear on mobile devices. Certain content may be difficult to read on smaller screens, or be harder to navigate using a touchscreen.

© Copyright 2024 Totara Learning Solutions. All rights reserved.


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