Self-Hosting H5P

I have found H5P to be a great tool not only in my online courses but for other online activities as well. It’s free, open-source, and easy to use. However, one of the limitations of H5P is hosting. H5P.org is solely there to get you into using H5P and playing with the different content types and not meant to store all of your interactive content. The team behind H5P has provided H5P.com a hosting service that you can pay for, a plugin for WordPress, and H5P is integrated with Moodle 3.9.

However, the problem I have with most of these formats is they aren’t free especially at the individual level. So from this problem, I’ve been looking at solutions for how best to help the individual wanting to reap the benefits of H5P interactive content.

H5P Editor

First things first, you are going to need access to an H5P editor. Lucky for you H5P.org is still an option. You can create a free account and begin creating. You have the option to download your creations as a .h5p file (this will be useful for later).

If you wanted to work on H5P offline there is a group out there that has created Lumi Education. This platform allows you to create, edit, and view H5P files directly on your computer. You can download Lumi for free at https://next.lumi.education.

Hosting

Second, utilizing H5P interactive content is going to be most useful on a website. This way you can always embed the content to a blog, google classroom, or learning management system. One of the difficulties was finding a place that would allow me to store content for free. That’s where GitHub Pages helps out wonderfully. GitHub Pages allows you to take your repository of files and turn it into a website. Here is a link to GitHub Pages for more information. Now I will put a disclaimer here, that GitHub does have some limitations and those are mentioned in GitHub Docs: About GitHub pages. However, even with the limitations, I found it met my needs. Here is a specific article on how to create a GitHub account and Creating a GitHub Pages site.

Coding

Third, there is some coding involved, but don’t let that scare you away. Thanks to resources like w3schools and GitHub repository, much smarter people than me did the hard work for you. All you have to do is swap in your content and you are good to go. Don’t worry, I’ll share a video showing you all the steps to get it working for you. One of the resources you’ll need is this project H5P-standalone 1.3.x from tunapanda or I have created a template h5p-selfhost-example on GitHub to easily add the project to your repository. (You’ll need to be signed into GitHub to see the “Use this template” button).

Conclusion

Hopefully, you’ve found the above information useful. Best of luck to you as you implement interactive content in any online environment.