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Tutorial Best Practices

Best practices and resources for creating and adapting tutorials and learning objects for library colleagues

Getting Started

PressBooks is a WordPress-based online platform for self-publishing books in multiple formats: e-books, webbooks, and print-ready PDFs.  Although popular with monographs, edited collections, open textbooks, its built-in interactive H5P plug-in also makes it a good choice for learning objects and tutorials. 

This content is meant as a supplement to the following resources:

For questions about the information provided in this guide or help getting started, contact Melissa Gomis (melissa.gomis@unl.edu).

H5P Overview

H5P is an easy way to create, share, and reuse interactive HTML5 content. It easily integrates into LibGuides, websites, PressBooks, Canvas, and more. It can include interactive video (annotation and quizzing), games, assessments, and timelines, just to name a few!  

H5P can allow you to easily:

  • Add questions or pop-ups to videos, presentations and images to break up lengthy content and make delivery more interactive.
  • Create visually dynamic activities for self-checking and practicing application of knowledge.

Use H5P activities for low-stakes knowledge building and practice, not major assessments.

H5P activities do not allow instructors to see the answers that specific students selected, so they are best suited for self-checks and practice. H5P in the Nebraska implementation of PressBooks also doesn't provide much usage data. If that is important to you, consider alternative options.

H5P.org provides information on all of the content types - over 30 with new ones in development, along with examples and practice space (free account required).

Accessibility

Most of the content types in H5P are fully accessible and some are fully accessible if you use captioning features. A list of content types and their accessibility is available on the H5P website. 

Accessing H5P

The free H5P account you can create on H5P.org is not recommended as a place to host your learning materials. At UNL you can use PressBooks as a platform to create H5P content that can be added to LibGuides, Canvas, or a website. You may want to create a test book or an H5P book specifically for this purpose. 

Make sure H5P is activated in the Plugins section.

h5P activate plugin PressBooks

Once H5P is activated you can go to the H5P menu to Add New content, edit, and view H5P content.

h5P menu PressBooks

Sharing Content

H5P reuse, rights of use, and embed

Most H5P content can be reused and embedded. 

Use embed to copy/paste code to add someone else's H5P element to your website.

Use reuse to download the H5P content and upload it to PressBooks for editing and share it back out. 

 

H5P Examples

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