Category: H5P

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Save the Date: Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day 

The Learning Enhancement and Technology Team in the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) are hosting a Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day on Monday 1st September 2025 between 12 and 3pm in the Boilerhouse.

This is a fantastic opportunity to meet the teams and people behind our Digital Education Technologies here at Newcastle. This will include: Canvas, ReCap, Vevox, Inspera (Digital Exams), Assignments (Canvas, Turnitin and New Canvas Quiz), Buddycheck, NULA, NU Reflect, AI, H5P, as well as the Numbas Team, Digital Adoption (M365 and Adobe) and Library Reading Lists Team.

This event is aimed at both academic and professional services colleagues already using these systems who want to take that step further, as well as new colleagues who want to learn about the digital technologies available.

The event will take place as a drop in, so you don’t need to sign up. If you would like to make any suggestions around what you would like to see at the event, please complete our Microsoft Form.

More information will be shared about this event over the summer.

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Canvas Blog: Creating Engaging Interactive Content Using H5P

This is the first in a series of blog posts looking at specific tools and aspects of Canvas and how they can be used to further improve our students digital learning journey.

The Importance of Interactivity

Developing interactive educational content is crucial for creating an engaging online learning experience. This approach enhances students’ effectiveness, engagement, and motivation by facilitating active learning instead of merely receiving information passively. Furthermore, the ability to include small self assessment activities within such content promotes self reflection allowing students to identify their own strengths and weaknesses. According to Yung-Ming (2013), interactivity plays a huge role in

“the perception of the ease of use of the learning system, as well as the consideration of the usefulness and the interest that stimulates.” Theodosis Karageorgakis

Why use H5P?

As a busy academic, it can be challenging to find the time and resources to enhance your teaching methods. However, H5P is a powerful tool that can significantly benefit your teaching, even amidst a busy schedule. Here’s why: 

  • Interactive and Engaging Content Creation: H5P simplifies the process of crafting interactive and engaging content. This feature boosts student attention, engagement, and overall enjoyment of the learning experience.
  • Time Efficiency: H5P offers a user-friendly interface along with a diverse range of pre-designed templates, facilitating the swift creation of interactive content. Once you grasp the tool, time savings are achievable through template reuse and the modification of existing content—whether created by you or shared with colleagues—to suit various topics or courses.
  • Versatility in Activity Types: H5P provides a multitude of activity types, such as interactive videos, presentations, quizzes, games, timelines, and more. This versatility enables you to accommodate different learning styles and adapt your teaching methods to the diverse needs of student groups. Whether your aim is knowledge assessment, concept reinforcement, or fostering critical thinking, H5P offers a broad spectrum of options.
  • Seamless Integration with Learning Management Systems: H5P seamlessly integrates with our learning management systems, including Canvas. This integration streamlines the content creation process, allowing you to stay within your Canvas page. Consequently, it minimizes the need for students to navigate between multiple tools.
  • Accessible Help and Support: H5P includes built-in tutorials for all content types, providing readily available assistance. Additionally, we offer further support through workshops dedicated to using H5P, fostering a collaborative environment for sharing knowledge and skills among colleagues.

How to build a simple resource

The video below shows how you can quickly build a simple H5P resource and/or import the Christmas advent calendar to add to your Canvas course.

Examples of H5P in practice

Click on any of the content types below to see an example of some of the excellent resources being created across the University.

Course Presentation

Interactive book

Flash Cards

Interactive Video

Branching Scenario

Getting started – Next steps

The H5P website https://h5p.org/ has a wide range of examples of content to get you started thinking about how you can use this amazing tool within your own teaching practice.

There are excellent step-by-step guides to creating various content types available at https://h5p.org/documentation/for-authors/tutorials

Training is provided by LTDS on a monthly basis, you can sign up on elements below.

H5P Introductory Webinar: https://elements.ncl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1722

H5P Advanced Webinar: https://elements.ncl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2141

Alternatively if you are interested in booking an in person workshop for colleagues within your school then please contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk

Finally if you are looking for some festive content for your students you can find the Newcastle University H5P Advent Calendar below, click the reuse button to export it. There are instructions in the video above.

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More support on using H5P – the tool that makes interactive content easy

H5P, the Canvas-integrated tool, allows you to create more interactive course materials. From simple formative quizzes to complex branching scenarios, H5P is an easy to use, but powerful tool to enhance students learning.  

Why should you consider using H5P? 

As a busy academic, it can be challenging to find the time and resources to enhance your teaching methods. However, H5P is a powerful tool that can significantly benefit your teaching, even amidst a busy schedule. Here’s why: 

  • Interactive and Engaging Content: H5P allows you to create interactive and engaging content easily, allowing you to increase students’ attention, their engagement, and make the learning experience more enjoyable. 
  • Time Efficiency: H5P provides a user-friendly interface and a wide range of pre-designed templates, making it easy to create interactive content quickly. Once you become familiar with the tool, you can save time by reusing templates, clone and modifying existing content (created by you or shared with colleagues) to suit different topics or courses.  
  • Versatility: H5P offers a variety of activity types, including interactive videos, presentations, quizzes, games, timelines, and more. This versatility allows you to cater to different learning styles and adapt your teaching methods to meet the needs of diverse student groups. Whether you want to assess knowledge, reinforce concepts, or promote critical thinking, H5P provides a wide range of options. 
  • Seamless Integration: H5P is compatible with our learning management systems, Canvas. You don’t even need to leave your Canvas page to create your content, and minimises the need for students to navigate between multiple tools. 
  • Help and support is at hand available: All content types have built-in tutorials. To support colleagues, we are also running additional workshops on using H5P. 

Using H5P to Enhance Learning and Teaching Webinar 

H5P is a tool integrated into canvas that allows users to easily create, share, and reuse interactive and multimedia content. H5P offers a wide range of content types, such as quizzes, interactive videos, games, and presentations. With H5P, users do not need to have advanced programming skills to create engaging and interactive content, as the tool provides a simple and intuitive user interface that allows them to add multimedia elements, interactions, and assessments to their content with ease. 

Next Date: 21st June 2023.  Sign up via Elements 

Using H5P to Enhance Learning and Teaching: Advanced Webinar

A session on more advanced tips on working with H5P – for users who would like to explore more advanced content types. This session is designed to empower educators with the skills and knowledge to harness the full potential of H5P in their teaching practices. This workshop is specifically tailored for academics who are already familiar with the basics of H5P and want to explore advanced features and functionalities. Through hands-on exercises and guided demonstrations, you will learn how to integrate H5P content seamlessly into your existing course materials. The workshop will also provide a platform for collaboration and sharing of best practices, allowing you to network with peers and gain inspiration from real-world examples. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the tools and expertise to create engaging learning experiences using H5P, thereby enhancing their teaching methods and fostering a more interactive and impactful classroom environment. 

Next Date: 30th June 2023. Sign up via Elements 

New Guide on Virtual Tours 

We have also published a new guide on H5P on the Learning and Teaching Website: Tutorial on Creating Virtual Tours Using H5P. It contains a step-by-step instructions on creating a virtual tour, with some example 360 and static images for you to practice.  

How do you use H5P? 

What is your experience H5P? Do you have examples of content you would like to share? Comment below and let other colleagues get inspired! 

See also: H5P Case Studies 

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Getting ready for the new academic year

Colleague typing on a laptop

With the new academic year fast approaching, we at LTDS are offering a week of online interactive learning sessions to help you get ready for the new academic year.

Here are more details about the new and exciting sessions. You can enrol on each of the six sessions below.

Learning from strategic digital education projects 

This session will take place on Thursday 9 September, 12.00 – 13.00.

This session will outline the achievements made in three strategic blended learning projects in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University Business School and the School of Biomedical, Nutritional and Sports Sciences. It will demonstrate the changes made to programmes and provide an opportunity to ask how it was done in a Q & A.

Sign up to the session through elements.

How to Make a Podcast

This session will take place on Friday 10 September, 13.00 – 14.00.

Newcastle University Learning and Teaching podcast was launched recently. The appetite for podcasting in education is going through a surge in interest in using this engaging medium with students. This workshop will take you through everything you need to know to feel confident and capable to make your own podcast.  

Sign up to the session through elements.

Saving time and enriching your courses with Canvas Commons  

There are two sessions available on Tuesday 7 September, 14:00 – 15:00 and Thursday 9 September, 11:00 -12:00.

Canvas Commons gives us a really easy way of sharing, finding and importing course content into Canvas courses.  We can use Commons to share a whole range of content types including, assignments, pages, quizzes, images as well as entire modules.      

This hands-on webinar provides an opportunity to explore  Canvas  Commons.  You’ll add content from Commons to your sandbox course.  We will consider what you need to do before sharing content and  discuss  examples of how sharing content can save time and enrich your courses. 

Sign up to the session through elements.

Getting your Canvas course ready for next year  

There is a session taking place on Monday 6 September, 15.00 – 16.00 and you can find further dates here.

The aim of this short webinar is to support you while you create your new Canvas courses for the 2021/22 academic year.   You will learn the process for new course creation, how to build your canvas course, and how to check your content is accessible.

The topics that are covered include, blueprints, content and assignment import from the previous year’s course. As well as homepage, curse navigation menu, accessibility, and publishing your content and your canvas course.

Sign up to the session through elements.

Using H5P to create engaging digital content

There are three H5P sessions over the course of this week. Monday 6 September at 13.00, Wednesday 8  September at 9.00, and Thursday 9 September at 14.00.

What is H5P? H5P is a resource that lets you create simple interactive content like interactive videos, quizzes, games, presentations, and more.

This training webinar offers a 30-minute introduction to H5P looking at some of the benefits in using this tool, followed by an optional 30-minute task where you can try creating some H5P content, with guidance.

Sign up to the session through elements.

Digital assessment – outlining the possibilities and processes

This session will take place on Thursday 9 September, 15.00 -16.00.

Assessing students in new ways and delivering feedback remotely during the pandemic has given us as a community of educators and learners a wealth of new experiences and ideas.  As we begin to return to campus, further digital assessment opportunities open up with the introduction of the Unversity’s new digital exam system Inspera Assessment. 

This session will share some of these new possibilities and provide an opportunity to reflect on what to retain from our recent experiences, as well as exploring how digital assessment can further enhance authentic assessment and ensure it is accessible to all our students. 

Sign up to the session through elements.

If you have any questions please get in touch with LTDS@ncl.ac.uk.

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Interactive Content with H5P

Introducing H5P in Canvas (5 min video tour)

Adding engaging and interactive content to your online course materials just got easier with H5P.  

This new online tool allows you to create custom learning resources such as branching scenarios, accordions, interactive images and videos, 360 degree virtual tours, simple formative quizzes, and so much more.   

The feedback we have from colleagues is that it is easy to use and that the built-in tutorials walk you through what to do.  No coding or software is required – all you need is a web browser.   

In Canvas you can work with H5P from the Rich Content Editor. 

H5P icon on the Canvas editing toolbar

MLE and blog authors can create H5P content to embed in pages and posts. 

Try it out 

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Coming Soon: Interactive Content Made Easy with H5P

Example H5P Hotspot item – click the + to try it out

Adding engaging and interactive content to your online course materials will get easier very soon.  The University has bought an enterprise licence for H5P for use by colleagues for a year.  Towards the end of August we’ll be making it available to all Canvas and MLE Teachers giving them the ability to make accessible interactive widgets, like the ones on this post. H5P isn’t just restricted to Canvas and MLE, it can be used on web sites too. 

We’re particularly excited about H5P!  Once it is turned on there will no longer be a need to be an HTML guru to do things like: 

  • Add accordions 
  • Add single question formative quiz questions 
  • Generate branching scenarios 
  • Create 360 degree virtual tours … and much more 

H5P has been successfully used by our friends in other universities– it’s very well documented and each content type has its own tutorial. 

We will be using the fully supported (H5P.com) version of H5P and, while we are plumbing this in, if you would like to have a peek at what is in store do check out H5Ps web pages for their documentation.  We would recommend holding fire on creating accounts on H5P.org and wait instead until we have our Newcastle H5P site up and running. It won’t be long! 

How you can help us? 

We have H5P for a one-year pilot initially – so we will need feedback on how you are using it, how your students are finding it, and how you would like our H5P support to develop. 

If you would like to get early access to H5P, receive updates, or help our evaluation please  JOIN OUR H5P COMMUNITY by filling out this form.

Sample H5P Course Presentation – try moving between the slides and answering the questions