Combined Multimedia Tools

This example comes from a Blog about Project Management (run by the EBI). It combines the H5P presentation with three Animaker videos. As a typical active learning tool, it includes some self-evaluation questions. Combined tools enable the implementation of more than one feature in a learning app. we call these kinds of learning apps “combined multimedia tools”.

Technical Background

The basis of this learning application is an H5P presentation. The cover slide uses background images, and a text overlay informs about the topic. To make the header readable, a half-transparent square is put below the text.

The H5P presentation automatically adjusts an inserted background image. This means that the image either must fit the presentation’s size, or H5P stretches the image to fit into the foreseen frame. During the development of best practice tools, we found out that the best fitting image size might be 1280 x 640 pixels. If the proportions do not fit, the pictures are distorted (which looks unattractive).

Here is an example:

Standard image The image brought to 1280 x 640 format
Distortion Without distortion
The proportions of the image don’t fit the size of the background. This leads to unattractive distortions. The size of the image is 1280 x 640 pixels. Each simple image editing tool can rescale images to a certain format.

Pedagogical background

The H5P presentation forces users to click to come to the next slide. Besides this simple interactive element, the presentation does not provide more contributions to active learning. The inserted videos also are passive items. To bring some active content into the learning app, the two questions force the user to become active.

Another possibility is to give the learners some assignments in context with the videos, for example, to note the mentioned keywords from the video.

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