The challenge

The University of Pretoria (UP) has been building digital learning content since the late 2000s. For most of that time, it did so one project at a time.

Every request took the same route: a lecturer asked for interactive content, the head of e-Learning approved it, and a small group inside the instructional design team built it.

The constraints were mostly structural. Authoring licenses for the software they used were expensive and had to be installed machine by machine, so only a handful of Instructional Designers could build the interactive content. "The time, the effort, the whole instructional design cycle you need to go through was a huge effort," says Dr Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director of E-learning at UP. "And then often you have a small reach."

Finished material shipped on standalone CDs. Changing it meant starting again.

The harder problem was evidence. Content built outside the LMS stayed outside the database. Some were converted to SCORM, but tracking stayed unreliable and support for the format was poor. "To be honest," Dr Jordaan says, "we could not even measure impact."

So UP had a model that was slow, costly, restricted to a few staff, reached a narrow group of students, and told them nothing about whether it worked. But the demand still arrived regardless. As Ms Mpho Thukane, Instructional Designer for the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, puts it, only a small number of the team worked on multimedia, so there were only so many projects they could take on.

The solution

UP selected H5P in October 2019, several months before COVID closed campuses. The choice stemmed from the university's teaching and learning model rather than from any emergency.

"We were looking for a system that would allow students to interact with content before going to the lecture," Mpho says. Lecturers needed to embed questions directly into video, students needed to answer as they watched, and results needed to flow into clickUP, UP's Blackboard-based LMS, so lecturers could see who had prepared before class. Above all, lecturers needed to build it themselves.

The model was tested almost immediately. The UP team ran the first official In-Video Assessment training in February 2020. "That was just in time," she says. Campuses closed weeks later, and UP's e-learning team shifted to the most urgent problem in front of them. "That year we had to shift our focus to core teaching things, like supporting lecturers to facilitate online synchronous sessions," Jordaan says. "Our priorities immediately shifted to immediacy and urgent things."

"With the example, it helps the lecturers to see how the end product will be, and then they go through the tutorial to develop that. That is one of the key bonuses within H5P."

Mpho Thukane, Instructional Designer for the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, University of Pretoria

What lecturers had instead was the product itself, and the resources around it. The e-education team kept building out UP's help site throughout the year. "That also helped them to help themselves to create the content," she says. Within H5P, lecturers could work it out as they went. "Within the platform, you have the tutorial and the example," Mpho says. "With the example, it helps the lecturers to see how the end product will be, and then they go through the tutorial to develop that. That is one of the key bonuses within H5P."

They created roughly 1,170 interactive items in 2020, and around 460 new authors joined the platform, the highest number of any year on record.

"A lecturer will go and sit next to another lecturer, and they will support each other, show what they're doing."

Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director of E-learning, University of Pretoria

UP never mandated any of it, and still doesn't. "We do not actually have any strategy to force people to use anything," Dr Jordaan says. It spread sideways instead. "A lecturer will go and sit next to another lecturer, and they will support each other, show what they're doing."

The results

Before H5P, UP's instructional design team could take on a few multimedia projects at a time, each running for months through a full design cycle. Since October 2019, UP's lecturers have built more than 3,700 interactive activities themselves.

The route described earlier — request, approval, hand off to a designer — is barely used now. "The requirement for multimedia declined significantly, in my mind actually to zero, or well, less than 1%," Jordaan says.

Demand for interactive content didn't fall, though. It rose by a large margin. What changed is who meets it. The projects that once queued for a designer's time are now built by the academics teaching the course.

Dr Jordaan frames the gain as control. "Lecturers have more control over time, more control over creating a storyline, more control over integrating it into the teaching outcomes for that specific course."

And it went well past video. UP now holds more than 3,700 interactive items across 40 content types, of which Interactive Video accounts for 2,017. Course Presentation, Question Set, Image Hotspots and over 100 Branching Scenarios sit behind it. Every one of those interactions writes back to clickUP. The multimedia UP built before H5P sat outside the database and told them nothing; students have now submitted more than 680,000 tracked attempts since 2019, staying above 100,000 a year for five consecutive years.

Every faculty uses it. Veterinary Science and Health Sciences use it most, which Mpho puts down to how those faculties teach: block sessions, dense content, and a real need to establish whether students arrive ready.

One senior lecturer who studied the effect on their own students described a shift in how students engage with video content.

"Using H5P has shifted my students from being passive viewers of video content to becoming more active, attentive and self-regulated participants in their learning. The embedded questions require students to engage with concepts while these are still fresh, encouraging concentration, inquiry and deeper processing rather than the superficial consumption of information. Learner analytics also showed clear increases in participation during the weeks in which interactive videos were used."

The feedback loop mattered as much as the questions. "The immediate feedback provided through H5P has enabled students to identify misconceptions and areas of weakness, monitor their understanding, track their progress and take greater responsibility for improving their learning. Students therefore experienced greater agency, accountability and connection to the lecturer's teaching presence, even within online and hybrid environments."

Their students returned a median student-experience score of 83 out of 100. The lecturer is careful about what that does and doesn't show: the study did not establish a causal improvement in academic achievement, and found that H5P works best alongside activities that build social interaction between students.

The migration

Last year, UP rebuilt every one of its modules in Blackboard Ultra, and six years of H5P activities — 3,700 items, built by hundreds of academics who are not technical specialists — had to come through it. Asked whether any of it needed rebuilding, Educational Technology Project Manager Mr Johan Slabbert was brief: "No, luckily not."

UP had moved to LTI 1.3 ahead of the transition. Lecturers re-link their activities through Ultra's Content Market and the content carries across. UP raised no support requests with H5P during the migration. "We didn't really have lecturers that had issues with things not working," Johan says.

The reason it survived is the same reason it was chosen. Johan’s team applies two non-negotiable tests to any external tool. It must run over LTI 1.3, so nobody has to create a second account. And it must write back to the gradebook. Tools that fail either test create manual work for lecturers — exporting results, matching student emails, uploading grades by hand — which is where adoption often dies.

Generative AI has raised the stakes on the second one. Anyone can now produce a good-looking interactive page in a browser external to the LMS. "But it doesn't identify the user," Johan says. "It doesn't write to the gradebook."

Mpho makes the same point from the teaching side. Without it, "there will be no way of lecturers knowing if students engage with the content before coming to class."

“The tool is an integrated component of our educational technology eco-system and it supports our strategic teaching and learning goals, as evidenced by its usage”

Dr Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director of E-learning, University of Pretoria

Six years on, the strongest evidence of what H5P is worth to UP isn't a number. It's the absence of one. Nobody is required to use it, nobody schedules it, and the team that introduced it has stepped back almost entirely. "I think a level of maturity may relate to the fact that we're not having queues in front of our door," Jordaan says. “The tool is an integrated component of our educational technology eco-system and it supports our strategic teaching and learning goals, as evidenced by its usage”.