Creating Interactive Content for Brightspace – Free, Fast and Fun!

Creating Interactive Content for Brightspace – Free, Fast and Fun!

If you are looking for adding more interactive content to your Brightspace courses, come join the NIC H5P Studio Space!

NIC has a space for instructors to quickly build small interactive content items for adding to a Brightspace course.

This free space is housed on a WordPress site that NIC has set up for all instructors to create their own interactive content.

A number of workshops were offered in late October 2024 but now all the content, steps and suggestions are on the Teach Anywhere site.

This is a CTLI-supported tool (not NIC IT) that is available because of the generosity of BC institutions who have installed WordPress with the H5P plug-in via a free platform (called the OpenETC). Usernames are free to all instructors in BC post-secondary institutions.

What is H5P Content?
  • H5P (HTML5 package) is an open source content platform to provide anyone with the ability to easily create, update, share, reuse interactive content – without any sort of coding or programming needed! Coders and programmers from around the world have built these interactive components and freely shared them with H5P.org who then provide integrations for their use in platforms like Drupal, Moodle and WordPress. Check out these examples on the Teach Anywhere Page: H5P Content Examples
Who Can Access and Create Content?
  • H5P is integrated into a BC WordPress site (part of the OpenETC) and NIC has set up a H5P Studio Space with over 50 interactive possibilities from quizzes, presentations, timelines and videos to content display with accordions and image sliders.
How Do I Get a Username to Get Started?
What are the Steps to Create H5P Content?
How do I Embed H5P Content into a Brightspace Course Page?
  • Once you have your username and have created some content, be sure to embed using dynamic resizing via the tips on the page: Embedding H5P in Brightspace
Where Can I Learn More and Follow Some Guidelines?
  • Be sure to check out the 6 short pages on H5P found within this Teach Anywhere site. The landing page, H5P Interactive Content, will get you started.
Why Use H5P Content?

There are many learning benefits in using interactive content. Here are a few examples!

  • Allows for practice with recently learned content (retrieval practice)
  • Provides engagement with content to help reinforce concepts and content (active learning)
  • Creates an opportunity to self-test understanding for self-regulated learning (formative assessment)
  • Gives the brain another modality for learning to assist in learning process (multi-modal learning)
  • Breaks up larger components or content (chunking learning)
  • Some of the H5P interactives allow for content display options (instructional design)
  • Can assist in summarizing key concepts and learning near end of a module (consolidation)
  • Aids in supporting independent learning (asynchronous learning)

In 2022, UBC held a symposium showcasing projects using H5P and recorded the session.

If this is of interest to you, reach out to CTLI (ctli@nic.bc.ca) for any assistance.

Post Written by: Liesel Knaack with image created by ChatGPT (2024)