Comments on: Anyone for a Hot Potato?

By: John Allan

John Allan — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 07:15:55 +0000

In reply to Stuart. Stuart, I was lucky enough to have been involved with a extensive project with Hot Pots published as SCORM learning objects. These are still going strong but we are now looking more seriously at other options moving forward. Hot Potatoes has been a reliable feature for the past two decades Where has the time gone? :-)

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:01:19 +0000

Hot Potatoes questions can be imported into a Moodle Quiz activity, Lesson activity, or using the Hotpot plugin https://docs.moodle.org/36/en/Hotpot_module (which I think provides more control).
I haven’t used Hot Potatoes as a SCORM object personally.
Perhaps the best thing about Hot Potatoes is that it is now multi-platform and can be used on Windows, macOS, and Linux – although it requires Java Virtual Machine in all cases, and that might not be available for security reasons (e.g. on a school laptop) and might run quite slow on older machines.

By: Niall

Niall — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:21:19 +0000

In reply to Stuart Mealor. Surely the best thing about Hot Potatoes is that it doesn't need plugin support? Just build to a SCORM package and import that way....

By: matt

matt — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 14:08:40 +0000

John, they can be hosted on Amazon buckets really easily. They still just work everywhere in the fragmented web.

And I agree that you can do some pretty neat stuff with them. I have heavily modded some here for a listening activity: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/listen4it.com/tests/EFFtest/listen4itTemplate+EFF.html

By: blogdeserena

blogdeserena — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 15:49:49 +0000

In reply to John Allan. Thank you! After days of trying one thing or another, I've almost given up the possibility of using hotpotatoes. Yesterdays I actually found some other tools which look quite interesting.

By: John Allan

John Allan — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:22:27 +0000

In reply to blogdeserena. With few improvements since 2009, Hot Potatoes is not going to be a solution that works with all contemporary tools. Have you tried uploading the Hot Pot activities on a remote server (possibly on a server at your work) and simply linking to the activities from your blog? It is frustrating using older technologies, I agree.

By: John Allan

John Allan — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:17:29 +0000

In reply to Stuart Mealor. Stuart, I was just advising an instructor today on learning object development tools. I was tipping the scale towards H5P. So may educators have not yet heard of H5P.

By: blogdeserena

blogdeserena — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:42:37 +0000

I’m a bit upset due to that I’d really like to use Hotpotatoes but wordpress does not allow plugin unless I self-host. I’ve tried to create a demo account, not working. I’ve tried to create other blogs that, according to info on the net, would allow to post hotpotato activities and there’s been quite a few other attempts to post activities, but with no result. All I want to do is post interactive stuff on my blog and can’t find a suitable solution, so I feel quite frustrated 🙁

By: Stuart Mealor

Stuart Mealor — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 04:49:27 +0000

I quite like Hot Potatoes, but it’s had a bit of a chequered past with Moodle, being in core, out of core, maintained plugin, non maintained plugin…. I never felt it was quite solid enough to use, not for my own courses anyway.
However it’s got such a long history, and so popular with school teaches in particular, I can see the attraction.
Although I wonder if H5P and other systems on the horizon will eventually overtake it?