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Why H5P deserves a spot in your teaching toolkit

Tuesday

H5P can help students practice what they’re learning, check their understanding, and receive feedback before high-stakes exams or major projects.

H5P may sound like a coding term—and technically, it is! Short for HTML5 Package, H5P is a collection of ready-made interactive content types that instructors can use to bring learning activities into their courses without writing code. From interactive videos and quizzes to flashcards, branching scenarios, and drag-and-drop activities, H5P offers a variety of ways to engage students.

With so many options, it might be tempting to assume H5P is too complicated or time-consuming to explore. But UCATT encourages instructors to take a second look! H5P can help students practice what they’re learning, check their understanding, and receive feedback before high-stakes exams or major projects. It also gives instructors opportunities to identify where students may need additional support along the way.

H5P is fully supported at the University of Arizona and integrates directly into Brightspace, so activities you build can live right inside your course content, be graded automatically, and sync to your gradebook if you want them to. It also works on any device, so your phone-savvy students can complete the activities on their preferred devices.

Why include "low stakes" checks into your content?

The fluency illusion can beguile students into believing they know material before they know it well enough to succeed on an important exam. Low-stakes practice testing helps solidify the knowledge in a manner that evokes engagement rather than provoking anxiety.

The following are a few examples of the interactive activity types:

  • Flashcards and Summary — low-effort to build, and useful for self-testing.
H5P Flashcard asking What does H5P stand for
  • Accordion, Image Hotspot, and Drag-and-Drop — lightweight, game-like activities for vocabulary, anatomy, diagrams, or any content where labeling and recognition matter.
H5P Drag and Drop for matching coffee drinks with their names
  • Course Presentation — students click through a slide deck themselves, with a quick knowledge check every few slides.
  • Interactive Video — drop a multiple-choice question into a lecture recording at the exact moment a key concept is introduced. Students can't passively scroll past it; they have to engage, and you get a signal of who's following along.
  • Branching Scenario — present a case study, ethical dilemma, or lab decision point where students choose a path and see the consequences play out. This is especially effective for professional programs and any course built around judgment calls rather than single right answers.
H5P Branching Scenario activity asking what instructors should do for making PDFs accessible

H5P activities can all be set to ungraded, and most can optionally be set as graded. Instructors can choose to set these activities for just enough points to encourage students to do them as preparation for higher stakes exams and projects.

You can choose your level

The appeal of H5P is also its challenge: with dozens of content types available, it's easy to feel like you need to plan time to learn all of it. You don't. A reasonable way to try it:

  1. Pick one lecture video or one slide deck you already use.
  2. Add two or three questions at natural pause points — a definition, a formula, a decision point.
  3. Leave it ungraded or worth almost nothing, and see what happens to engagement and to the questions students ask afterward.

That's it. Most instructors who try this once find a second and third use for it on their own, because the format tends to suggest its own next application — a syllabus quiz, a pre-lab check, a reading comprehension check before discussion.

Where to get help

You don't need to figure this out alone. UCATT supports H5P university-wide, including training sessions, consultations, and help getting activities integrated into your Brightspace gradebook. Explore UCATT active H5P events to register for upcoming webinars, Instructor Pathways, IDEA meetings, and the like.  If you're curious what a specific content type looks like before committing to build one, the InTech team can walk you through examples, or you can browse H5P.org's public examples to see activities in action before creating your own.

The bar to try H5P is lower than it looks, and the payoff — actually knowing what your students understand, in time to do something about it — is one of the more useful five-minute investments you can make in a course.

Have questions about getting started with H5P in your course? Reach out to the InTech team, explore the H5P Help Page on the InTech Instructor Help Pages, or explore the Teaching and Course Design tabs on the UCATT website.  

This article was developed with support from Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic.