This month, our guest editors are Associate Professor of Teaching, Chemistry, Dr. Kayli Johnson, and Associate Professor of Teaching, Psychology, Dr. Simon Lolliot. They highlight how H5P can make course lectures more interactive, and share resources from the recent UBC H5P Symposium to support instructors in adopting this open-source technology in their teaching.
What makes for a bad lecture? You can likely rattle off several characteristics without much effort. These probably include an instructor who talks too much, offers no opportunities for student engagement, provides no space to clarify misunderstandings, or moves on before foundational concepts are mastered. Approaches like these are ineffective because they result in information being merely transmitted, not taught.
What is concerning is that many of these worst practices are replicated in online educational resources such as textbooks and instructional videos. This matters as more content is being moved online to make room in classrooms for active learning. This raises an important question: how can we embed high-quality best practices in active learning into environments that have traditionally been passive?
HTML5 Package (H5P) provides one such solution. H5P is an open-source tool – available at UBC – that enables users to make questions, text, images, audio, and videos interactive. These interactive elements can then be embedded anywhere online, from Canvas course shells to open educational resources and WordPress sites. With more than 50 content types available, users can create a range of interactive elements including: interactive videos that branch, audio-embedded questions, drag-and-drop, Virtual Tours (360), and interactive textbooks. H5P is a simple yet powerful and flexible tool allowing users to imbue each element with research-backed best practices like retrieval practice, scaffolding, and descriptive feedback in an interactive environment. But how does one go about doing so?
We came across this question often when presenting the merits of H5P. It is precisely this question that guided the creation of the UBC H5P Symposium. Now in its third iteration, the symposium brings together educators, instructional designers, and researchers from around the world to explore how H5P can be used to create powerful, formative assessments and to explore evidence-based practices for embedding active learning in traditional learning content.
For example, in his keynote on teaching with instructional video from the 2026 H5P Symposium, Dr. Richard E. Mayer emphasized that effective instructional design for videos should minimize unnecessary cognitive load, carefully structure essential content, and promote active engagement so learners can meaningfully process and understand the material. To achieve this, he recommends, based on his research, that integrating interactive prompts for self-explanation during video pauses and using segmenting to break complex content into learner-paced parts significantly enhances the learner’s ability to transfer and apply new knowledge. Similarly, in her keynote, Dr. Veronica X. Yan highlighted that integrating active learning requires shifting from passive review to effortful retrieval practice, such as having students teach concepts to others or use “brain dumps” to strengthen long-term memory connections. She further advises instructors to design “desirable difficulties” into their content, specifically by interleaving different topics and spacing out repetitions, which forces students to actively differentiate between concepts and prevents the “illusion of learning.” These evidence-based practices can be supported through interactive tools like H5P, which enable structured content presentation, embedded retrieval activities, and spaced practice within digital learning environments.
The Symposium has also included hands-on workshops for getting started with H5P, practitioner panels demonstrating various use-case scenarios, best practices in creating accessible formative assessments with high-quality feedback, lightning pedagogical talks and demonstrations, and keynote addresses from internationally recognized scholars in cognitive sciences and educational psychology whose research has shaped our understanding of the science behind learning. In 2022, the Symposium received the BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education.
As pedagogical, global, and technological developments further push educational materials online, the question is no longer “how can we make online education interactive”, but “how do we make high-quality interactive elements that promote learning.” The UBC H5P Symposium reflects our growing commitment to helping faculty answer this question.
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