What is H5P? #

H5P is many things. One of the easiest ways to describe it is a way to create and share interactive content such as quizzes:

You can test drive other content types at the h5p.org site.

Why does H5P exist? #

Previously, a lot of this interactive educational content was built with Adobe Flash. When Flash was discontinued it left a lot of valuable work at the risk of being lost forever. H5P was created by a company in Tromsø, Norway called Joubel (now H5P Group) as a direct answer to the demise of Flash.

H5P is an open source standard which that if the H5P Group ceases to exist, all the content will still be able to used by the authors that made it. H5P was designed to be portable and runnable across all platforms. There are integrations for Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard and Moodle, just to name a few. Having one language for defining interactive content means the same content can seamlessly travel across all the platforms.

How can I test H5P? #

You can test creating H5P content types by heading over to the community site h5p.org and creating a free account. Note that the h5p.org is just for testing purposes and content that you intend to use for commercial purposes should be created on your own website.

To host your own H5P content, add the H5P plugin to your WordPress, Moodle, or Drupal site. Alternatively, you can integrate H5P via LTI with platforms like Canvas, Brightspace, or Blackboard. Here’s more information on the types of H5P integrations.

How can I customise H5P content types? #

The code for content types are almost always open source and can ususally be found under the H5P Group’s Github organisation. There are, of course, many content types created by the community and you would have to track down each contributor’s Github to find the source code if it is open source.

The development process is not difficult but just takes a bit of onboarding. You can read this guide on setting up a development environment to find out more.

The future of H5P #

H5P has seen great adoption in recent years and I envision it only going from strength to strength. You can keep track of the latest news by following the h5p.org blog.

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