In the next instalment of our ‘Focus on H5P’ series, Educational Media Producer Nat Fay collaborates with Vanessa Scarf from the School of Nursing & Midwifery to explore how H5P could be used in the teaching of Midwifery coursework subjects.

This year, Vanessa had the daunting task of delivering the course content for the Graduate Diploma in Midwifery in Canvas. In late April, she was approached by the LX.lab team to participate in a project collaboration to produce some content using H5P branching scenarios.

“I had just begun to use H5P to create some basic slide presentations and felt the branching scenario to be beyond my reach’ reflects Vanessa. “Over the years, the Midwifery team has used filmed scenarios to assist midwifery students to understand the importance of respectful human interaction and build skills around clinical situations they would experience in practice. It was these scenarios that caught the eye of the LX team and they felt we could develop them into a branching scenario to enhance their message and make them more interactive.”

Nat took Vanessa on a deeper dive into H5P functionality, with particular focus one of H5P’s activity types: branching scenarios. The pair created a branching scenario using an example clip and then developed a scenario around the management of postpartum haemorrhage as a learning tool for the upcoming session.

“At first, I thought this would be straightforward, as there are clear processes in managing this emergency,” says Vanessa. “However, while working closely with Nat over several Zoom sessions, I realised that in order to make it meaningful, we had to break it down into small learning opportunities which linked together to create a complete picture.”

The next step was to focus on creating a skeleton structure of all the flowchart options that needed to be shown. Vanessa created a flowchart diagram, showing all the content boxes and the arrows which would be linked together.

Vanessa and Nat were then able to begin the process of translating the options and creating placeholder text boxes in the H5P’s Branching Scenario Configuration tool. Nat explains: “By using a series of text boxes that either jumped to another text box or recycled back to a previously existing text box, Vanessa and I devised when it was appropriate to use a branching question versus simply progressing to the next text box. Vanessa found this process of creating a skeleton structure in H5P to be very helpful so that she could clearly see what kind of content she needed to create. Particularly how the content flowed from one text box to another.”

Once the skeleton structure was created, Vanessa could prepare and structure her written content from the existing powerpoint slides of her original teaching materials.

“There are three ways of displaying your written content,” explains Nat. “They are: Course Presentation, Simple Text Only and JPEG image slides that have been exported from a powerpoint file. JPEG Image slides could be a simple method for showing just 1 slide of information; for multiple slides, you should use the Course Presentation Content type. If using the single slide image, you should also copy and paste the main learning content text into the Alternative Text section when uploading your image so that screen readers for accessibility purposes can still read the text that is displayed as an image.”

An additional tip from Nat was to keep constantly previewing the changes that Vanessa was making – there’s a Preview button in the top right corner of the H5P interface and this allows you to see what the student view looks like, so it’s easy to check it as you go.

Despite the negatives of dealing with the effects of the pandemic, Vanessa has found positives in the opportunities to develop in a remote teaching environment and has appreciated the ‘attentive, creative, and insightful assistance’ on the LX.lab team.

“Nat’s understanding of this process has been pivotal in creating a logical, educational, and engaging branching scenario that mirrors a real file situation. It has been such an exciting process as Nat’s skill in mapping the content and my knowledge of the clinical processes have combined to employ the use of H5P as a great teaching and learning tool.” 

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