What is H5P?

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.

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

• The workflow for importing H5P content-type libraries into the site, and upgrading them over time
• The workflow for creating H5P activities as course activities
• Configuration options and settings such as activity completion and appearance
• How H5P authoring and activities are displayed in Totara courses

H5P and third-party developers are responsible for:

• Maintaining a collection of content-type libraries and responding to feature requests
• Addressing bugs with H5P activity behaviour
• Security, accessibility, responsiveness and performance of content-type libraries and activities

H5P.org and H5P.com both have large, active communities with a range of resources including documentation, tutorials, and user forums that provide information, learning material and support.

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

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.

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 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.