Off the back of several international conference presentations, University of British Columbia (UBC) faculty members Kayli Johnson (associate professor of teaching, chemistry) and Simon Lolliot (assistant professor of teaching, psychology) noted that many instructors were motivated to use H5P but didn’t know where to start. To remedy this, the international UBC H5P Symposium was hosted online for 150 registrants on February 22 and 23, 2022. H5P (an acronym for “HTML5 Package”) is an open-source content collaboration framework created to make it easy to create interactive, media-rich web content that works seamlessly in the most widely used platforms for creating educational content. There are dozens of H5P content types that can be used to test students’ knowledge while they are still learning about a topic. We at BCcampus are pleased to present the H5P Symposium’s organizing committee with this month’s BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education!
Nominated by Eva Zysk, University of British Columbia
The February 2022 international two-day symposium at UBC introduced attendees to H5P, its benefits and pitfalls, and use-case scenarios across several disciplines. It included a keynote address, panel discussions on best practices, several hours of training in H5P, and studio time for participants with support from several IT and H5P experts. The symposium website offers dozens of resources and walk-throughs of several H5P content types.
The symposium organizing committee included Drs. Johnson and Lolliot and key individuals from the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology: Will Engle, open education initiatives strategist; Rie Namba, open educational resources developer; Novak Rogic, web strategist; and Lucas Wright, senior educational consultant.
The symposium featured a keynote address from Dr. Mark McDaniel, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, on research-based best practices for developing formative assessment for students. The symposium also included
- Project showcases to demonstrate how H5P has been used across different disciplines
- Roundtable discussion on how to involve students in consuming and creating H5P class content
- Two 90-minute workshops demonstrating in detail several H5P widgets, where attendees created them alongside the demonstration
- Two 90-minute consulting clinics where symposium attendees could get started creating their own H5P content with the support of 13 H5P experts
The symposium was well-attended, with 140 unique sign-ons from faculty, staff, and students from UBC (~50% of attendees were from UBC), across Canada, and beyond.
The organizing committee also developed a supplementary H5P symposium website. All materials can be found on the symposium website, including the slides used, self-paced walk-through modules of the relevant H5P types, conference recordings, and several other helpful resources.
The symposium was such a success that Drs. Johnson and Lolliot were invited to present a workshop at a large engineering conference —the American Society for Engineering Education 2022 Annual Conference — in June and held a second well-attended workshop at UBC’s Celebrate Learning Week. The symposium inspired the development of a multi-day H5P HackCamp at UBC to further encourage H5P use and develop a community of practice. And given the success of the H5P symposium, plans are being made to make it an annual event.
Congratulations to all the recipients, and thank you for your amazing work!
Relevant Links:
Previous Honourees:
Jennifer Kirkey, Rajiv Jhangiani, Cindy Underhill, Michael Paskevicius, Maja Krzic, Grant Potter, Irwin DeVries, Tara Robertson, Christina Hendricks, Tannis Morgan, Inba Kehoe, Diane Purvey, Erin Fields,Arley Cruthers, Chad Flinn, Aran Armutlu, Terry Berg, Will Engle, Florence Daddey, Brenda Smith, Lindsay Tripp, Mary Shier, Brad Bell, Debra Flewelling, Michelle Harrison, Sally Vinden, Ali de Haan, Sara Humphreys, Jim Maxwell-Campagna, Andrea Niosi, Petra Menz, Nicola Mulberry, Izabela Mazur, Meizhong Wang, Theresa Southam, Christine Miller, Brian Coey, Agnes d’Entremont, Shantel Ivits, Valerie Irvine, the BCIT BSN Program, Linda Woodcock, Hope Power, and Emily Schudel
The featured image for this post (viewable in the BCcampus News section at the bottom of our homepage) is by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels.