Status update
Image credit: Oliver Tacke
Happy birthday H5P!
We just turned 10 years old. H5P is a software and an enormous global community. We have achieved a lot so far. Enormous adoption, we are millions working towards H5P’s vision and we have hundreds of millions of users. More and more tools and platforms support H5P. We support an impressive number of languages. H5P is known and talked about everywhere. I am very proud to have been part of this development.
With all of these achievements in the last ten years, can we top it in the next ten years?
Of course we can. We have some bottlenecks to get rid of in order to release the full force of the massive H5P community and the awesomeness of the H5P concept. We currently have too few developers to review and accept contributions, and too little bandwidth in general in the H5P Core Team. This has been setting us back the last couple of years. The H5P Core Team is working hard to resolve it now. Funding is in place and new talent keeps joining the team. The next ten years will result in achievements much greater than what we have seen so far. We will see much better interactive content being built much more efficiently.
Upcoming improvements
In addition to constant improvements to content types, especially accessibility improvements, the OER Hub and a new development environment is coming quite soon.
An early beta version of the H5P OER Hub was initially met with some skepticism. Large organizations were worried about letting all staff members share all their materials, and the search function was simply not good enough. People did not use the early beta version to share content. The version which I thought was 95 % done had to be put on hold. Major improvements are now being tested. I think we all look forward to getting started with the new version very soon. An efficient way of sharing content is at the heart of our vision. Developers are key to making it all happen.
Getting ready to develop H5P content types is painful and tedious (Drupal 7, LAMP++ is currently required to get started). It can take many hours if you are unlucky and start struggling when setting up the environment. It is holding developers back from joining us. The new development environment will be installed via one command in minutes. It will make it much easier for developers to join and contribute to our community.
Moving towards our vision
We are empowering many to create content. Millions. We are not yet empowering everyone however. Share and reuse aren’t quite there yet either. The Core Team still has a lot of work to do. All of us have a lot of work to do. I believe the most important next steps are to attract and help more developers succeed. We aim to turn the Core Team into facilitators instead of being bottlenecks. And even more importantly, we must fill up the OER Hub with content when it is ready.
An OER Hub with content covering most subjects. Content that may be easily adapted and used on most platforms. The holy grail of OER. Content that works the exact same way and is editable on all platforms. It will help new community members get started and create content much faster. It will help all of us build better resources in considerably less time.
A full Hub and more developers in the Core Team and community will speed up our journey towards our vision to
Empower everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content.
