Key dates
| Date | Event |
| Monday, May 4, 2020 | Call for Proposals opens |
| Friday, June 5, 2020 | Call closes |
| June 8–12, 2020 | Adjudication |
| Monday, June 15, 2020 | Successful submission notification |
| Monday, July 6, 2020 | Grant recipient announcement |
| Monday, November 30, 2020 | Delivery of H5P content |
Introduction
Since 2012, the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training has funded B.C. open education initiatives and tasked BCcampus with managing them. BCcampus Open Education’s goal is to provide flexible and affordable access to post-secondary learning resources in B.C. by making available openly licensed textbooks that align with the most highly enrolled first- and second-year undergraduate subject areas, as well as with select skills-training and trades subject areas.
A key component of the next phase of open education work for BCcampus is the enhancement of the existing open textbook collection through the development of complementary open homework systems and accompanying formative assessment questions that provide students the opportunity to practice using and reinforce new knowledge.
One of the open homework systems BCcampus is supporting is an application called H5P. H5P is an interactive content development tool that enables the creation of interactive learning content. H5P integrates with Pressbooks — the BCcampus open textbook publishing platform — as well as various learning management systems, including Moodle, D2L/Brightspace, Blackboard, and Canvas. It also integrates with WordPress and Drupal, making content developed in H5P interoperable across many web-based learning and publishing platforms used in British Columbia.
Synopsis
This is the first of two calls for proposals targeting the development of formative activities for open homework systems. This call is focused on developing activities using the platform H5P. The second call will be issued in early summer 2020 and will focus on a soon to be determined platform that supports math-based courses and programs.
This first call for proposals is for post-secondary instructors and faculty in British Columbia to develop sets of content types in H5P that support open textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection (see below for a list of suggested books). The intent of these grants is to develop activities in which students can practice applying new concepts and skills that align with content within the selected open textbook.
Eligible grantees include individual instructors, groups of faculty or instructors (either in a single institution or across multiple institutions), departments (either at a single institution or working collaboratively across multiple institutions), institutions, or external working groups made up of instructors and faculty connected to B.C. post-secondary institutions (i.e., articulation groups or other working groups).
The maximum value of each grant is $10,000.
Application Process
The application form should be completed and emailed to open@bccampus.ca.
While the application form provides the basic information required, those wishing to submit more detail may attach appendices as required. The evaluation committee looks for proposals that are well written and specifically address the guidelines. Designate a lead representative for the project and submit the proposal through the lead. Include a letter of support from a member of your institution’s senior administration for the proposal workplan.
Criteria for Successful Proposals
Successful proposals will meet the following mandatory criteria:
- H5P interactions are integrated with an existing open textbook that has been created with Pressbooks (see list of suggested openly licensed textbooks below).
- A variety of H5P content types are used in the textbook.
- H5P interactions are designed as formative self-assessment activities that can be used by students to reinforce, apply, or check their learning (see list of eligible H5P content types).
- Activities and self-assessments demonstrate and support effective pedagogical practices, such as spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and dual coding principles.
- All activities are either developed or reviewed by an instructor or faculty member teaching in the subject area.
- Includes a budget documenting the use of the funding being requested.
- Includes a timeline.
- Includes an outline of how many and what types of H5P interactions will be developed with the grant.
Grant proposals are also evaluated on the following secondary criteria:
- Positively impacts large numbers of students across the B.C. post-secondary system.
- Includes student voices and student feedback in the development or evaluation of activities.
- Encourages collaboration across disciplines and departments, both within the institution and with other B.C. post-secondary institutions.
- Addresses accessibility and makes use of the principles of Universal Design for Learning.
- Applicant has demonstrated experience developing formative assessment questions and activities.
- Applicant has demonstrated experience developing interactions using H5P, specifically in Pressbooks.
- Considers equity, diversity, and inclusion and makes use of inclusive practices.
- Incorporates Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies.
Funding Deliverables and Requirements
Successful grantees will develop and deliver the following:
- An enhanced open textbook in Pressbooks with all H5P interactions integrated with the textbook.
- H5P questions aligned with content in an existing open textbook. The number and types of questions should be noted in the application.
- All questions must include correct licensing metadata elements, including name of author and Creative Commons licence type.
- All questions must include constructive feedback and guidance for learners.
- All H5P interactions will be licensed with a Creative Commons license that allows the reuse and remixing of each element.
- All H5P elements created will be shared to the H5P open repository for reuse.
In addition, grantees must:
- Complete deliverables on time.
- Follow sound open publishing practices for all OER created or adapted with these funds.
- Participate in an interview about the project to be published on the BCcampus website and newsletter.
- Acknowledge the support of BCcampus in the development of these resources.
BCcampus Support
Because of the technical nature of this project, BCcampus will be providing some additional support to successful grantees, including:
- Technical training webinars on effective use of H5P within Pressbooks.*
- Self-serve references, including technical and pedagogical content on best practices for developing formative self-assessment student material.
- A Pressbooks copy of the existing open textbook in which grantees will develop their H5P activities.
* While these resources will be available to successful grantees to help support the development of the H5P activities, applicants should have previous experience with H5P and/or open textbook authoring within Pressbooks.
List of suggested open textbooks
BCcampus is committed to the concept of reuse in order to maximize previous investments made in the development of open textbooks. To that end, BCcampus has conducted a review of open textbooks created with previous rounds of open education funding to determine which textbooks may be enhanced with the addition of interactive student self-assessment activities. These recommendations are based on textbook reviews, adoption rates, and the prevalence of publisher homework systems being used throughout the system.
While applicants are not limited to choosing from the above list of open textbooks, applicants must identify in their application a Pressbooks-developed open textbook from either the B.C. Open Textbook Collection or elsewhere that they intend to add H5P interactions to.
Eligible H5P Content Types
The intent of this call is to develop formative self-assessment activities that students can use to practice applying and check their knowledge. Therefore, only H5P content types that support the goal of practice and self-assessment will be approved for development. The content types that will be approved for funding include the following:
- Advanced Fill the Blanks
- Arithmetic Quiz
- Branching Scenario
- Dialog Cards
- Dictation
- Documentation Tool
- Drag and Drop
- Drag the Words
- Fill in the Blanks
- Find the Words
- Guess the Answer
- Image Pairing
- Interactive Video
- Mark the Words
- Memory Game
- Multiple Choice
- Quiz (Question Set)
- Single Choice Set
- Summary
- True/False Question
Additionally, the following H5P content types may also be acceptable. However, there are currently accessibility issues with the following content types that are scheduled to be fixed in upcoming releases. If you intended to use any of the following, please refer to the H5P accessibility chart to help determine their current status:
- Essay
- Find Multiple Hotspots
- Find the Hotspot
- Flashcards
- Image Sequencing
- Questionnaire
Examples of H5P
Below are a few examples of the types of H5P interactions within Pressbooks that help support formative self-assessment and can be used as models for development by successful grantees. There are three different examples here based on technical and cognitive complexity of content type used. Funding requests should reflect the complexity of content types designed.
Relatively simple
- Drag the Words example from KPU open textbook Learning to Learn Online, in which the H5P activity provides learners the opportunity to recall information from the previous page about the SQ3R strategic reading technique.
Somewhat complicated
- Fill in the Blanks example from University of Wisconsin. A number of H5P Fill in the Blanks activities are included in this introductory Portuguese language textbook, which give students the opportunity to practice pluralizing Portuguese words.
- Quiz Question Set example from the University of Saskatchewan open textbook Introduction to Psychology, in which the H5P activity at the end of the chapter allows learners to test their understanding of the chapter concepts by taking a short self-test.
Complex
- Branching Scenario example created by OpenRn. This virtual simulation designed for health professionals allows students to test out a variety of answers in a guided activity that incorporates video and different scenarios.
Review and Selection Process
Evaluation, selection, and awards are determined by an internal review committee, and will be evaluated against the mandatory and secondary criteria listed above.
If you have further questions, email open@bccampus.ca.