From Legos to Learning Design: Why H5P Still Inspires Me
From childhood creativity to instructional design, H5P brings a flexible, hands-on approach to building engaging learning experiences.
Author: Theresa Huff, H5P Ambassador
Finding my Lego moment
As a kid, I often found it difficult to explain or describe what I envisioned in my mind to others, and that’s why Legos were (and still are) one of my favorite toys. Its amazing array of simple building pieces helped me depict what was in my mind’s eye, and by their design, Lego builds were meant to be broken down and improved, could be built with friends, and held endless possibilities. H5P, for me, are the Legos of my grown-up instructional design world.
I first found H5P in graduate school at Idaho State University when Lance, a fellow online student, used it in his assignment. I immediately messaged, “Okay, what is that and how do I get it?” Lance gave me a quick walkthrough, and as I played with all the H5P types, I felt that jolt of Lego excitement. I began to envision new ways to convey instruction interactively, begging learners to get curious and explore. I had been a teacher for about 20 years at this point, but the creative possibilities of H5P rekindled that early teaching joy.
"The reaction is almost identical: a mix of surprise, pride, and eventually, 'Look what I built!'"
Building with purpose
Lest you think I was just a burned-out educator who needed an excuse to play (you’re not wrong), I began to discover how easily core instructional design and multimedia principles could be applied using the H5P types. I live in Chicago, and one of my hobbies is building Chicago architecture with my box of Legos. For me, it’s a low-stress, curiosity-based way of studying the design of architecture. Building with H5P has worked much the same way for me. The more I play with and build with H5P, the more I see where design principles could be applied. In my graduate assignments, I found myself often turning to H5P to build assessments that measured learning objectives or modeled a particular learning theory. Just as durable as my Legos, H5P was easy to improve and portable from an LMS to my portfolio website to my OER Pressbook, or to just store as a file on my own desktop.
H5P in research
H5P naturally became and continues to be a part of my research life. During a gamification redesign of a statistics course (StatsKwonDo) with one of my professors, we applied multimedia principles like segmenting and signaling using H5P, which ended up reducing stats anxiety more than the gamification over the semesters (Coffland & Huff, 2022). Another instructional designer and I used it for an active learning and motivation study, finding that active learning applied using H5P significantly increased learner motivation, satisfaction, and the relevance of the content (Publishing January, 2025). Even my dissertation used H5P to apply four multimedia principles to reduce learner anxiety by design (Huff, 2024), a study which ended up winning the 2024-25 Kole-McGuffey Prize for Excellence in Research award.
H5P in the classroom
Happily, H5P is also a key tool in my daily work. As an Open Education Resource (OER) instructional designer and as a teacher of digital pedagogy, I get to watch both faculty and students discover H5P in almost the same way. I help faculty design and build interactive OER Pressbooks using embedded H5P, and I love watching the creative work reinvigorate their teaching. My students had the same moment when they created H5P activities for their learning theories chapter in our co-created Design in Progress OER. Regardless of who they are, the reaction is almost identical: a mix of surprise, pride, and eventually, “Look what I built!” It is one of the best parts of this work. To help ease folks into all the possibilities, I built the H5P "tool look book" chapters in the Open Voices, Just Choices faculty handbook, which breaks up ways of using H5P for presenting content, for review and practice of content, and for reflection and deep learning.
Like a brand-new box of Legos, H5P Group continues to inspire me. They roll out new content types (thank you, Oliver Tacke!) such as H5P 3D or the H5P Game Map, sparking fresh ideas for me and for the faculty and students I support. And I have to say, the H5P Academy Awards bring a delightful sense of global celebration to the work. As someone who won Best Use of Multimedia a few years ago, it meant a lot to have creative instructional design work recognized in such a positive, community-centered way. Now, I look forward to seeing and gaining inspiration from each year’s winners.
"H5P, for me, are the Legos of my grown-up instructional design world."
The heart of it all
But the heart of H5P, for me, is the global community. For the same reasons I love working in Open Education, I love seeing how educators around the world use OER and H5P in creative, culturally rich, and often surprising ways. They are as diverse, interesting, and beautiful as the individuals who create them. The Open world and the H5P world share freely, support generously, and collaborate (rather than compete) with curiosity. As a proud H5P Ambassador, I am not paid to talk about H5P, but it embodies values I care about: openness, creativity, inclusion, and learning that feels human. So, here’s my box of Legos (H5P). Let’s see what we can dream up and build up together.
