I am a solo instructional designer at my library. I love instructional design and elearning development, but I don’t have as much time for it as I would like! I love using Storyline to build tutorials and courses, but it’s become too burdensome to maintain existing courses while also creating new ones.
I am involved in the open education movement on my campus, so I have also been thinking about ways to build learning experiences that are partially or completely open so that my colleagues can edit them or take control entirely.
H5P is slowly catching on – it’s an open-source tutorial development platform. You can build out tutorials at H5P.org and embed them elsewhere as iframes, or you can install an H5P plugin for Moodle or WordPress and build them on your own turf.
This week I worked on updating existing YouTube videos related to open education, and I wanted to update my existing Storyline course that contains the videos (it’s like a Netflix-style video gallery). I wondered – would it be possible to recreate this format using H5P? I would love to be able to share this course and know that anyone with a computer/internet would be able to make a copy and make it their own!
Yep, it was possible!
I used H5P’s Course Presentation format to develop it. H5P doesn’t allow you to duplicate elements like Storyline does, but if you build out a master slide, and build out the background graphics separately, you can clone the master slide and just swap out the background.
The original Storyline file had cute graphics for each video, whereas in H5P I either embedded the video or selected the “Display as button” option so that the tutorial shows the videos as icons, and when the user clicks, the tutorial lightboxes the videos.
You can use the “Display as button” option for Text, Images, and Videos. I didn’t use any of the other interactive options, like quizzes or games, and I deactivated the player bar because I have on-screen navigation. Storyline lets you choose the slide size, whereas H5P has a fixed 2:1 ratio.
Check it out! I love that the look and feel is very similar between these two versions!
Built with Storyline
(By the way, the Storyline version is a couple years old, so some of the videos are dead or out-of-date!)
Built with H5P
Click Download above to get the H5P file, or visit the H5P site to get a copy.