"The return on investment has been massive... Building a lot of activities takes time and money, and H5P reduces both of those things."

Eric Young, Manager of Education, Good Roads

Challenge: reaching learners 20 hours from the classroom

For some of Good Roads' learners, attending a training course used to mean a 20-hour drive, a week away from work, and a hefty expense claim. If you're the only person in your department in a remote Northern Ontario municipality, that week away is close to impossible.

Founded in 1894, Good Roads serves 428 of Ontario’s 444 municipalities, plus 21 First Nations communities and many corporate partners across Ontario's transportation and infrastructure sectors. Eric Young joined the association at the peak of COVID in Fall 2020. Good Roads had trained Ontario's municipal road workers in person for its entire history and had no digital learning to speak of. His job was to change that.

Not everyone was convinced it could work. The majority of Good Roads' learners fix potholes, grade roads, and operate heavy machinery. They don't spend their working days at a computer, and standard click-through compliance training was never going to hold them.

The doubt was reasonable. Many of the 180 volunteer instructors and subject matter experts had spent decades teaching this material in a room, and needed to see how that expertise would carry across to a screen. "I was told by more than half of them that we were wasting money," Eric says. Some preferred to wait and watch before committing their own course to the new format.

Connectivity was the second problem. The members with the most to gain from eLearning are the ones furthest from any in-person session, and many of them sit in Northern Ontario, where, before Starlink, file size decided whether a course was usable at all. Eric had met the same constraint earlier in his career, running eLearning projects in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and India, where a single SCORM package could take 15 hours to download. The answer in both cases was to keep the content light, and that requirement drove both his choice of Brightspace and his case for H5P.

Solution: interactive content a three-person team can produce with ease

Good Roads set out to rethink how municipal education could be designed and delivered at scale. They wanted to rebuild courses for online delivery, create content that was applicable and made accessible for the people out there doing the work, and build a digital programme that could grow without growing the team. H5P became one of the main tools supporting that transformation.

Eric had tracked H5P for years, waiting for the right project. Good Roads was it.

"None of us are courseware developers, we're all instructional designers. We need tools that can make our life easier."

Eric Young, Manager of Education, Good Roads

His team of three now packs every course with H5P activities, such as branching scenarios, interactive videos, hotspots and sorting exercises. Building that volume of interactivity from scratch would be, in Eric's words, an absolute nightmare for a small team. H5P's editor lets them assemble activities in minutes, and Smart Import can roughly halve the build time on individual activities. That keeps development costs flat while the volume of interactive content keeps growing.

"We needed a solution that would let us scale our online learning program without scaling our development costs at the same rate. H5P helped us do that."

Eric Young, Manager of Education, Good Roads

Ungraded by design

Most H5P activities in Good Roads courses are deliberately ungraded, with unlimited attempts. Short knowledge checks appear often throughout each course, so learners can confirm they have followed a section before moving on, instead of reaching the end of a module and realizing they lost the thread three sections back. Longer scenario-based activities, including branching scenarios and interactive videos, work the same way.

"H5P interactives were set up to let learners apply knowledge to realistic scenarios in a safe, ungraded environment. Action-based learning helps build confidence and improve their ability to recall and apply processes and procedures on the job."

Eric Young, Manager of Education, Good Roads

Good Roads learners arrive with years of field experience and well-formed views on how the work gets done. Ungraded activities let them check what they know against current practice, get feedback in private, and reach their own conclusions, without a failing grade getting in the way.

Learner surveys back it up. Alongside repeated praise for the interactive videos and branching scenarios, learners keep returning to the checkpoints as the thing that makes the content stick.

Many asked for even more activities. Several rated the courses above the college e-learning they'd done elsewhere.