As I reflect upon my journey as an Open Pedagogy Fellow, I am highly satisfied with my progress to date. From the start, my (broad) goal consisted of re-designing the delivery mode in my General and Oral Pathology course, from a traditional lecture format to a more student-centered and engaging one. Furthermore, I envisioned creating course content that incorporates active learning strategies and high-impact teaching strategies with dental hygiene student collaborators as guides on the side. With perseverance and excitement while learning the H5P technology (H5P, 2021), I accomplished my goal and then some. Hence, how did my Open Pedagogy Fellowship journey begin, and where am I today?
I started my journey by reading the information about What is Open Pedagogy?, posted on the University of New Haven Open Pedagogy homepage. Scrolling down on this page, I accessed the link, resources page, in the following passage: “Useful Context For more on what open pedagogy means to others (by way of how-to guides and articles interrogating examples), peruse our resources page, which will continue to grow as the project moves forward” (University of New Haven, 2021). The next page provides the reader with a plethora of Open Educational Resources (OER); thus, I spent some time reading, learning, and researching the various OERs listed under the Browse Zotero Library by Topic, which includes:
Continuing my learning adventure about OERs, I accessed the OER Examples page, there I found the answer – Building Interactive Resources — Branching tree skills practice. This link brought me to the H5P, a technology that is an open resource that provides users with building and authoring interactive content. I had an aha moment! From here, I read a great deal about how to use the H5P technology and its application in the classroom (H5P, 2021). I then invited my senior dental hygiene student collaborators (Kylie and Gabi) to weigh-in – did they think that the H5P technology would change the delivery mode in my General and Oral Pathology course? Would it deepen the students’ learning? Would it satisfy the multi-modal learner? Would it engage the students in the classroom? And, most importantly, would the H5P technology be easy to learn and easy to integrate into my lectures? Kylie and Gabi agreed that this technology seemed to perform all of the above.
After having several meetings and email exchanges with Ryan Barber (H5P representative) to learn about H5P technology and its integration into course work, Kylie, Gabi and myself were growing more intrigued with the learning process. From that day forward, the seniors and myself adhered to an agenda and a timeline. The agenda consisted of the selected pathologic lesions and conditions to be highlighted in the interactive content. The timeline included an agreed upon day and time we would meet per week in the months of July and August. As we worked together, a democratic process ensued about the development of the interactive content, images, videos, and assessments. It was truly an enlightening process while collaborating with my dedicated seniors – they were always focused and always encouraging – smart too!
From a productivity standpoint, we created a mix of twelve interactive content. Although, the H5P technology has its limitations and nuances, we found the technology to be intuitive and engaging. Relative to its learning curve, most time was spent reviewing the tutorials (H5P, 2021) to guide the creation of the interactive content. In addition, time was spent learning about searching for open content (videos and images) and the Creative Commons copyright licenses.
Where am I today? I intend to trial the H5P interactive content in my General and Oral Pathology course fall 2021. Although I am optimistic about its success in the classroom, I anticipate that the H5P technology will increase student engagement and retention of content for its application in clinical practice. Resonated by Kylie Schlottman, senior dental hygiene student collaborator, “although oral pathology can be a difficult concept for some [students] due to [its] abundance of information, it is all so important to know as a dental hygienist, so giving students a way to remember the information and apply it to a clinical setting before being faced with it in a real life situation, is something that I hope the students will like and appreciate.”
What are the next steps with H5P? My hope is to create more interactive content for my General and Oral Pathology course, to upload all of the content in the H5P OER Hub, and to integrate the H5P technology directly into Canvas. Lots to do and lots to learn!
References
H5P. (2021). Examples and downloads. https://h5p.org/content-types-and-applications
University of New Haven. (2021). What is open pedagogy? https://unewhavendh.org/open-pedagogy/what-is-open-pedagogy/#What_does_Open_Pedagogy_Mean_to_Us
