 I'm really happy to be here at our first Moodle Moodle. My name is Arlene Mendoza-Maran and myself and I call a Christopher Beeson who you'll be seeing in a few moments. We are instructional technologists at North Carolina State University. Our unit is called the Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications or Delta for short. So what we do there is we help instructors to use Moodle to teach their courses. Can I just get a quick show of hands? Raise your hand if you've ever taken an online course. So can you identify it all with this statement? It's sometimes difficult to focus when you're presented with large amounts of online course content. These days our mental bandwidth for consuming information online is sufficiently broad that if we aren't intentionally devoting all of those channels to the task at hand it can be really easy to become distracted much like a dog who sees a squirrel. So what kinds of things can you do in an online course to keep students' attention, to keep them focused, and to keep them inside your course and engaged with the material? One of the ideas that you can use is active learning. So active learning is a concept that's based in constructivist learning theory, jargony type stuff. That just means that people learn by building their own knowledge, by taking in new information and connecting it to existing knowledge to build new or better understanding of the information. And it differs from kind of the top down stage on the stage model of instruction where the instructor is pushing out the content to students and students are just passively receiving it and expected to learn by being given all of this material. What we're trying to do in active learning is encourage students to do something with the information. They do need to consume the material, they do need to read the information or watch the information but they also need to understand it and they also need to do something with that information. Apply it or practice it in some way that's meaningful that enables them to make those connections so that they are really engaged and really applying the information to build true knowledge of that material. So in an online course you can utilize many active learning strategies to purposefully engage students so that you can reduce the risk of distraction. I just wanted to make a short note that there's a large body of research that supports active learning. If you don't believe me I do have references at the end if you're interested but there are a lot of positive outcomes that come from utilizing active learning strategies. Some of the main ones that I want you to keep in mind today are things like motivation, keeping students motivated within the course, student engagement of course, keeping their attention and information retention, things that require them to actually incorporate with their learning through the course and a whole bunch of other benefits too that's supported by the research. Interactions within an online course are supremely important in supporting learner engagement and also good student outcomes. You may or may not know that there are three main types of interaction that can occur in an online course. You've got student to instructor interaction where there is instructor presence and instructor feedback and communication that happens with the student that enables the student to understand how they're doing in the course to track their progress and to be connected with an actual instructor even though they don't physically interact with them as they would in a face-to-face course. Of course there's also student interaction with their peers. Peer learning has been shown to be very effective in helping students to stay interacted and stay engaged in their course. And then the third piece that sometimes gets overlooked is the student-to-content interaction. You think of the content of an online course is pretty much the bulk of it. This is your readings. This is your videos. This is the stuff that instructors want students to learn. But oftentimes what happens in an LMS is that large amounts of content get uploaded and students are just supposed to interact by reading or watching. And there's not really any meaningful connection that happens outside of that. So what we want to try to encourage you to think about is that the student-to-content interaction should really involve more of a practical application of knowledge. Like, yes, they do interact. They do read the content. They do watch the material. But then they do something with it, incorporating those active learning techniques. They're more than just passively reading or watching. They're actually engaging in meaningful activities that go beyond just, oh, this is flashy. This is, you know, kind of bells and whistles where they get to click stuff. So if I add that in, then students will be more engaged. It's more than that. It's using these types of activities intentionally to provide a meaningful interactive experience with the content that really enforces the learning. So there are many strategies to enhance the effectiveness of interaction with the online course content, including taking those large amounts of content and breaking them up into bite-sized, digestible chunks, and then interspersing them with these types of meaningful activities that allow for practice and application of that knowledge. So this is where H5P comes in. Has anybody heard of H5P? Has anybody used H5P? So you know where I'm going here. So H5P stands for HTML5 package, and it is a plugin that you can incorporate in Moodle which adds an interactive content activity type to the activities and resources menu. And through this plugin, instructors are able to create dynamic HTML5 interactive content right from within the Moodle course. There are a lot of different content types available, and I'm going to turn it over to Christopher now who's going to go into details about some of them. Come on up, Christopher. Hi. Thank you, Arlene. I just wanted to take a few minutes to go over some of the interactive content types that we've actually chosen at NC State. That we... Because there are actually 38 different content types that are available. And that could be considered a little bit overwhelming for the newcomer to H5P. So I just wanted to go over a few of the ones that we have chosen to boost classroom engagement. So I'd like to point out that at NC State we've had our instance of H5P and Moodle for nine months, I believe, and only the past five of which have been live, but we've still seen a huge increase in utilization of this tool. We chose content types that were specifically selected for ADA compliance and accessibility purposes that had a true academic purpose and did not duplicate anything that we've already had in place for our faculty to use. So here I have listed some of the academic content types that we've chosen and into gradable and non-gradable. This is very helpful and something that you would want to show all of your instructors from the very beginning. But as you can see here, the ones denoted in green are actually content types that we've had to enable in order to utilize in larger, more robust applications such as the interactive content types such as the interactive video and course presentation. Okay, and we have a brief video that we're going to show. So the first is the interactive video, and this is by far the most widely used content type. It allows you to add interactions such as links and text and images and quizzes on top of the video clips. They just pop up, and you have the ability to force pausing, to disable retries, enable conditional branching of logic even to support adaptive learning modules. The next is drag the words, and this allows for instructors to create text-based challenges for students to drag the words into the sentences. And this is similar to the fill-in-the-blanks interaction, which I have not included in the demo, which actually allows you to have more autonomy with case sensitivity, alternative spellings, and multiple correct answers. Then we have drag and drop. I love this example because I love Ikea and Lortharings. So as you can see, you just take some of the objects and drop them into the correct drop zone, sorting. Then we have flash cards. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah, flash cards. It's a set of cards that contain a picture on one side and text on the other. You have to, students have to type in the corresponding text and see if they have the answer correct. This one is gradeable. Then we have dialogue cards, which are similar to the flash cards, but it allows you to add audio, and this is strictly designed for practice and is not gradeable. So only formative. And the next one is going to be image hotspots, which I think is really cool. It allows you to add hotspot buttons on top of an image. And in this example, the students are clicking on the hotspots to open up pop-ups that contain additional resources and content, even video. And actually Arlene created this. So I think it's really cool. Then you have timeline, and timeline is a content type that allows you to place a sequence of events in chronological order, and with each of these, you're able to add more interactive elements, multimedia elements as well. And last but not least is course presentation. And this is where everything comes together in one. Course presentation allows you to add keywords, presentations. It allows for similar to the interactive video, but it's going to be on a user-paced basis. So you can also include interactive video and quizzes as well into the course presentation. It's quite a phenomenal tool. Arlene? All right. So now that we've given those of you who aren't familiar with H5P a little bit of a teaser, I'm just going to go through these slides, just talking about some of the what we think if you're going to start with just a few of the 38 content types, interactive video, course presentation, image hotspots, and drag and drop are some of the ones that we think will be some of the most not only popular, but really good at enforcing that student engagement and interactivity with the useful content interspersed with those bite-sized chunks of information. So if you're going to talk to instructors about using H5P, I would just suggest a few tips. And one of those would be that H5P is really recommended for use for low-stakes knowledge checks. They're not really intended as a final exam, as you might see. This is really to use it in that active learning process to allow practice and knowledge checks and letting the student get immediate feedback on the content that they're learning at the time. We also want to provide clear instructions when using the activities. And also, as Christopher mentioned that we want to be clear about, you know, is this a graded activity or is it not graded? In the Moodle settings, there's a couple of things that I just want to point out. There are a lot of settings that can vary with each H5P content type, but I just want to point out that there's an option in the Moodle settings that occurs below the editor for H5P to display an action bar and frame. We recommend if it's going to be visible to students to uncheck that. We also want to make sure that you're putting it in a category that is appropriate, whether it's graded or non-graded. And that's because each H5P activity generates an entry in the gradebook, even though not all the content types are themselves gradable. And then we also want to make sure that you pay attention to the maximum grade settings. It defaults to 10. So if you have seven points worth of questions in your activity, that might be kind of confusing for some students. H5P.org is a huge community of users growing every day. And the website has a lot of information about getting started if you're interested. And it also gives you a test space to try to try out some of these activity types if you like. At NC State, we were in the unfortunate or fortunate position of having to create some documentation for how H5P works in Moodle as there was not any that existed previously. So you can go to that link and see the Google Doc for what our documentation currently looks like and we hope to be adding to it and fleshing that out as we get more usage and more tips and tricks for you to use. All right. So as I promised, if you want to learn about active learning, here you go. And we will happily take any questions. So as a former history teacher, I love the timeline version of H5P. You can get that students to do that as well. If you've got a question for Arlene Christopher, now is the time to raise your hand in the air. If it's a super important question, you could raise two. It's up to you. Or stand up, indeed. I can't see very well. Where's that question? Wait for the microphone. Share with class. I have a question about the interactive video. So are we able to embed anything in the video? So earlier in the presentation, there was a question popped up. I guess my question is, are we able to have the frame to show a documentation, for example, or an iframe or something? So in the interactive video content type, you have the ability to add different question types. You can also add pop-up images or your own text. I am not sure that it allows live embed of other source content. I see. So I believe it to be, you create it within the interactive presentation just with questions and other types of text and images. Two months ago, last time I checked on that, it wasn't possible. Got it. Thank you. So you can go to h5p.org and request it on one of the forums and you might get heard. They actually listen to the user community with all open source. There's one more question over here, just a quick one before we move on. Hello. I'm from University of Montreal and we are in process of integrating HPT in our model with 45,000 students and 3,000 teachers, but of course the language is an issue. So I was wondering, I don't know if it's HPT, this organization who created this plugin as they intended to translate it into French, if we could do that and how it would work? Actually it's actually going to be, most of the time whenever you're referencing a video, you're referencing something that's already online and pre-existing, such as a YouTube video. So if you're going to have captioning or translations, then that will happen actually through YouTube, not through HPT. Does I answer your question? The names of the activities, interface and questions, I don't know if right now if it supports translations yet. As far as I'm aware, the HPT is initially funded by the Norwegian government, so I should imagine that one translation to Norwegian, so definitely go to H5P to have a look at that. Thank you Arlene and Christopher for your presentation and for your time.