The H5P OER HUB – facilitating global collaboration
H5P’s vision of empowering everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content.
You might notice the similarity between H5P’s vision of “empowering everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content” and Moodle’s “empower educators to improve our world“.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, as both projects (yes they are software projects) have a strong ethical and community history, and most people involved really do want these systems to improve education.
The H5P OER Hub is similar to Moodle Net. Both are focussed on creating a repository system of content / courses that can be shared.
H5P have stated [https://h5p.org/oer-hub-coming] “The most important part of our roadmap has long been to … integrate an OER Hub … to facilitate global collaboration. It was also the most requested roadmap item by far on the last H5P Conference. It will be an integral part of the H5P authoring tool and allow users to easily share their content with every H5P user in the world! Content shared by others will of course be searchable and repurposable.”
More worrying are statements like: “If we can fill up the H5P Content Hub quickly with free, open content that everyone can use and repurpose we can make life so much easier and learning so much better for new and existing community members.“
Based on what I see teacher creating, most of it is fairly poor. Sure, it’s ‘good enough’ for use for 5 minutes in a class, or within an online course, but it’s not something I would see as a great base resource.
And where is the quality control here?
What’s the point of rushing to fill an OER Hub, with resources of hugely varying quality? What is the benefit here?
A more considered and long-term useful approach would be to have a peer-review and / or rating system built into an OER hub (ANY OER Hub) at the outset.
In the same way that people Retweet, Like, and Share fake news and inaccurate non fact-based articles, what is the implication of teachers reusing content that is inaccurate, out-of-date, misleading, uninteresting, etc.?
I don’t see how ANY repository of OER can be transformative unless there is a fundamental process of quality – just like with a journal, where submitted content is peer-reviewed, rated, and even removed if it’s weak.
Maybe this missing element is why no OER in education has taken off?
Or maybe it’s something else?
What do you think?
- H5P periodic table – 8th September 2023
- Moodle 4.0 – 15th May 2022
- Moodle 4.0 other highlights – 14th May 2022
