Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting the amazing things you can achieve with the interactive tool H5P in our ‘Focus on H5P’ series – starting this week with tips on how to make your videos interactive!

Interactive videos are an excellent way to enhance and enrich your existing or newly produced content. Using H5P’s Interactive Video tool, you can engage your students through a variety of different question and answer, and additional information, content types within a single video. You can use any existing video and upload the video file to H5P – or you can also use any YouTube link as well. Then, once you’ve created content in H5P, you can use it on either UTSOnline or Canvas. 

Here are three benefits to using H5P for your interactive videos.

1. You can take existing videos and transform them into interactive videos

Using the Interactive Video Tool, you can easily add checking for understanding questions such as multiple choice, true or false, and other simple questions as an overlay, directly on top of the video. For example, if you have an existing video, you can add a question after the first section of the video. The video will automatically pause and the question will appear as an overlay. If the student answers the question incorrectly, you can set up the question options so that the student needs to re-watch a certain section of the video before being able to attempt the question again.

2. It’s an easy 3-step set-up process

H5P provides a beautiful user interface. It may seem a bit daunting at first, but once you are accustomed to the functions and workflows, the interface is actually very easy to use. 

It is as simple as: 

  1. uploading an existing mp4 video file or pasting in a YouTube video link
  2. adding questions to the video
  3. adding a summary task

There are a heap of icons showing various activity types above the video – when the mouse hovers over each icon, the user is able to read what activity type it is. Once an activity type is selected, the interface changes to provide further options for that specific activity type, such as what is the question and what are the answers, correct and incorrect (as well as what happens if the answer is incorrect).

3. You can make sure students watch the entire video!

H5P has some clever options that you can set up to make sure all of your students are watching the video from start to finish. Often it can be difficult to know if your students have watched the full video, understood and comprehended the content without watching the video in double speed, or have fast-forwarded through sections. H5P provides a list of ‘Behavioural settings’ which offer extended options such as looping the video, starting at a particular time in the middle of a video, and the prevention of skipping forward in a video. It should be noted that – if this option is selected – students will not be able to rewind the video either.

Want to learn more?

Discover the full benefits of making interactive videos in our detailed tutorial (duration: 1:22).

Next in our ‘Focus on H5P’ series: Creating a dialogue with H5P….

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