25th September 2013

DrupalCon Prague BoF - Quizzes and H5P - eLearning in Drupal

John Ennew
Technical Director

I ran my first BoF session on eLearning in Drupal at DrupalCon Prague today.

eLearning in Drupal has a reasonable amount of interest but there isn't always the resource available to implement some of the ideas being discussed. However there is some momentum in the area with representatives from a number of companies at the BoF able to demonstrate and discuss their current projects.

Interactive eLearning Content

The Quiz module has a long history with Drupal but has been generally been untouched since Drupal 5 with new releases following the same patterns as the previous versions. Quiz does a lot and, though modular, does not provide the flexibility required by todays projects.

Alternatives to this approach currently available are equally troublesome. For example. native flash applications allow rich interactive experiences but poor integrations into data capture and analysis as well as presenting the usual problems with Flash on different devices. The SCORM standard attempts to define eLearning content as package which can be transported between eLearning systems. However it is a large standard and is difficult to implement.

The H5P project provides a possible solution to these problems. It was demonstrated at the BoF by one of the maintainers who has clearly put lot of thought and effort into this technology. H5P stands for HTML 5 Package and wraps eLearning content in a platform independent player. It also provides an editing interface within Drupal for creating interactive content on a par with what was possible with Flash, except using Open standards. It is a very exciting project and I highly recommend you check out the live demonstration.

eLearning distributions

There are some interesting developments on the eLearning distribution front with Opigno being discussed by the BoF. The current version is now entering final testing and looks like a stable base for eLearning projects - I also recommend testing this out for consideration in for your next eLearning project.