TRANSCRIPT: Tales4Teaching ep. 83 – Leveraging H5P: the Bimbimbie Project

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Joan: Welcome to Tales4Teaching, a podcast where we explore stories with purpose in higher education. We’ll share expert insights, engaging interviews, and thought-provoking discussions that will inspire your teaching. On behalf of Deakin University I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands and waterways on which you are located. I acknowledge the Wadawurrong people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners on which this podcast was recorded, and I pay my respects to Elders past, present and future. 

My name is Joan Sutherland and this is Tales4Teaching, brought to you by Deakin Learning Futures.

Joan: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode where I’m talking to Simone and Mahen from the Faculty of Business and Law and how they leverage H5P for an interactive learning experience for their students. Hello and welcome.

Simone: Hi, Joan. How are you going?

Mahen: Hi Joan.

Joan: Good. Thank you. To get us started, can you please introduce yourselves and your role at Deakin.

Simone: My name is Simone Tyrell. I’m a Learning Designer in the Business and Law Learning Innovation team.

Mahen: Mahen Jayawardena. I am an Academic Developer with the Learning Innovations team as well.

Joan: Now, I saw your showcase where you leverage H5P for an educational case study for a new house construction. Are you able to tell us a little bit more about this project?

Simone: Sure. So, we were asked to help this unit chair in designing the new unit. So it was a new unit to Business and Law property real estate. But it was coming as a combination of two unit from SEBE actually. So the unit chair, Tom, was tasked with combining two units into one. And so that was the first thing. And it was all around building and construction with sustainability at the forefront of that. On top of that, Tom had already started a passion project for himself and he was developing a sustainable build basically from the ground up, with sustainable practices the whole way through, and wanted to incorporate that in the unit as well.

Joan: That’s definitely an authentic case study, isn’t it?

Simone: Yeah, it really is.

Joan: So we know that our case studies are a great way for students to explore and construct their own knowledge of a subject through that active learning and engagement. So what are the pedagogical principles that inform the development of this project?

Mahen: So we know that learning is a verb. It’s it’s an activity students do and we believe that students learn by engaging in these, as you mentioned, active learning. What we kind of tried to do was to collaborate with the unit chair to design and craft some of these opportunities for students learning to happen. So the H5P artefacts we created were based on the pedagogical principle. We also built upon some of the Deakin learning principles of authenticity. But strangely, the reality is, is when we started to do this, we kind of didn’t intentionally think of, you know, the pedagogical principles. I think the reality is that as learning designers our thinking is built on pedagogical principles, and when we do the work, we really get automated and we kind of do it. And actually, as you said during at the beginning of this, you know, informal conversation when we actually had to do this podcast, it gave us an opportunity to reflect back and oh, why did I actually do it? And I kind of it for me gave that opportunity to kind of understand, oh, actually we did think of these, but not implicitly, you know, it automatically came about because of the we and how we think of learning design the way we do things.

Joan: It’s interesting that you say that because it is one of those processes that is automatically built out unless you call it out and say, what is it? How are we doing this? And actually question it at the beginning, it’s maybe not as explicit.

Mahen: Exactly, exactly, but we make it look like we do it in all the research and stuff. But I think most of the times in reality, we sometimes go backwards and think, oh, why do you actually do it? And we try to build it around it.

Joan: You can see that  it is well designed.

Mahen: Oh yes. Yes, definitely. Um, it wasn’t just a fancy thing. It really was built on the principle of actually, what can students do with this to learn sustainability and all the other active learning principles. And I think the process we followed kind of was built around those kinds of principles, of even deconditioned principles. And the principles of learning design are built around kind of, you know, that principle of, as I see it, as learning is a verb, what do students do? Rather than what do we as teachers do? It’s more about getting students to do things.

Joan: I think that’s one of the key questions is what do students do? Versus what is the theory. Simone?

Simone: Yeah, I was going to say a lot of it was what Mahen said it wasn’t like what pedagogy, what lens? A lot of it was we have this issue. We’ve got this house that is going to be integral. The unit’s going to be built around it. The assessments are going to be built around it. But it’s 2.5 hours away from Melbourne. How do we get the students to see what’s happening down there? And not only that, in subsequent trimesters well, the house is built so you can only obviously build it once. How do we keep using the same resource in the future, and make it authentic and actually kind of give them that lived experience. And that’s what Tom wanted them to make it feel like it was the very first big project, in industry. And I do think he achieved that and we used the H5P 360 tour to do that get them to walk through and say the ins and outs of the build.

Joan: What a beautiful thing you just said around the lived experience to actually say this is what it actually is. This is the actual process, because I imagine there would have been hiccups along the way that he could talk about through his unit. So this is only one vehicle to actually do that. And I’d imagine you would have been restrained by time if it’s a build that’s actually a live build. Did that impact the design and development of this project?

Simone: It did because we had to get some aerial shots and we got 3D images of the of the build and some video of the house as well as us to create the H5P and so obviously we had to wait and that to be completed. So it was T1 launch. It was that sort of logistical timing in getting someone in to do the photography and the videographer and getting it all built and then us getting the 3D images and putting it all together, creating, that H5P object ready for T1.

Joan: Just a simple process really.

Simone: There was a lot in it but it all fell into place quite nicely, which was a bonus.

Joan: It’s looks like it. It really is a great artefact to have moving forward. So you chose to use H5P. What features and functionality was important in the design of this project that led you to using H5P versus another tool?

Mahen: We’ve, we’ve done similar projects where we’ve used video, we’ve used some of the other tools. So, so we could actually see that by using that video walkthrough and the hotspots and some of the others, we could actually see how this can be quite useful. So I think because the long term we’ve used parts of the tools, we could see this as, as a product that would bring the power of H5P to do that, because as you said, the house was already built, so we couldn’t see the underlying structure. But the tools like, you know, the hot spots and some of the others were tools that would help support that student learning by actually being able to see, okay, so what’s that surface like? What’s behind this wall? It was quite easy for us to kind of you know, pinpoint H5P as the possibly the best tool in the Deakin ecosystem for this.

Simone: And I think it was important to have something that was Deakin supported. So there are other things out there that you could go a walkthrough and we, you know, did have a little bit of a look around, but in the end, you want to know that you’ve got that support for the product and should anything go wrong, you, you know, you’ve got some backup and I mean really it did everything we needed it to do.

Joan: It’s interesting because sometimes they can be something shinier on the horizon. But exactly what you just said, it did everything you needed it to do. And the experience is a great one and really impactful by the looks of things.

Simone: Tom’s get some great feedback on the it.

Joan: That’s really good to hear all that must be nice from the design perspective, to hear that feedback and to hear that there is that positive engagement.

Simone: Yeah, it’s rewarding to know that the work you put in it, and I think one of the students commented along the lines of, it’s great to see the teaching team put in so much effort into the resources. So, that’s it’s nice to know that we’ve had an impact as well as Tom’s teaching, which he gets a lot of positive feedback on as well.

Joan: I love it when it comes full circle like that and you can actually hear that feedback because often you don’t hear that feedback unless it’s not working, so well done on that, guys. It’s really impactful, I should say.

Mahen: That’s, I think, an important fact to highlight that, you know, for projects of this nature to actually shine, you need, not just the design, but the implementation – the final product. If the unit chair doesn’t use it, or the teaching team doesn’t use it and it’s just an isolated event. Then the whole process is, you know, subpar because you know, it’s really when and you got a motivated unit chair whose teaching philosophy matches and you can use that design that it really shines and this is one of those clear examples. So, I’ve really got to shout out to Tom for actually, you know, using his unit site in his teaching practice and that was that we built in each teaching practice and as we shared in one of the other sessions, you know, the feedback has come to show that, you know, how much students value that that experience.

Joan: And its value, isn’t it? So knowing that there’s been value put into that resource, and it’s one resource, but it’s taught throughout the unit. So, Tom’s leveraging it. But you can see the value that’s in there and what’s actually being put into it. So from myself, I looked at it and I thought, wow, there’s a lot of work gone on in here and a lot of collaboration just with who’s got to be part of it to get that to fruition, essentially.

Simone: And it’s adaptable. So, you know, if Tom wants to add some different images later on, we can do that. You know if he wants to change things around, we can do that as well. He can mix and match a little bit which is also great.

Joan: It’s a great example of leveraging their appropriate technology for the impact of that learning experience. You mentioned earlier, that you sort knew from the ecosystem, what would be suitable because you’ve used H5P before. Is there a particular process that you’d go through to design and what technology that you use for different artefacts, or is it just your knowledge of the Deakin ecosystem of what you’ve used?

Mahen: Well, it’s I think, we’re quite experienced, this is not the first project we’ve done. We’re kind of intuitively aware that, okay, these are the features, what we want and what are the tools we can kind of quickly go through. Okay. What are the short list of tools that we could kind of possibly use it for? And then we might kind of build a prototype or something to kind of, if I in doubt, to see and run it by the unit chair, and we’ve got a list of examples we’ve built across the years so we can actually show it to the unit chair just say, here’s, here’s what we can do for you here. The tool we can do for you. Here’s what they look like. So they they also get that experience of saying, okay, that works. They can play around with it and see what it looks like, so I think that helps a bit.

Joan: What great way to get buy in like little shop. You know what you like, what you don’t like. And from a design perspective, with your experience you can say, well, they don’t like this feature, but another, product other or it doesn’t do it. And this is what we’re left with and what a great way to get to that stage really quickly.

Mahen: Yeah, yeah. I think that was a project we did a long well a couple of years back. It was because H5P might be quite new to somebody, so they might not know the ins and out of it. And the H5P main site has examples, but they are very K-12 examples, so sometimes academics would like to see what it looks like in a similar discipline or similar unit to what they are after. That’s why we built so they can see, oh for teaching this principle, this really looks what I’m after and heir colleagues are there so have kind of that value as well. If one of our colleagues has done this and there must be some value in this. So we’re using some principles of that kind of support that kind of, buy in from them, as you said.

Joan: That peer-based learning as well.

Mahen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Joan: That validity is there. That’s such a great way to prototype really quickly.

Simone: Even just using some of them when you’re talking to them or if you’re demonstrating so that they see it in action and they might go, oh, I can use that here. But it’s definitely about having that conversation. What do you need to get out of the tool? What is the end result?

Joan: Well, it seems like a really great use case and it was really effective. And it’s great that you’re getting great feedback coming back to you in the feedback loop. What advice would you have for other teaching and learning teams if they wanted to use H5P for educational case studies?

Simone: I would say go for it. I think H5P is fairly well embedded now, and I’m sure most teams would know how to use it. It’s fairly easy to use. It’s fairly intuitive. Our only thing is we’re very mindful of where we store it and who the collaborators are and putting it in a central spot so they can always be accessed. It’s a little bit of trial and error and just be creative, because sometimes it looks like something’s not going to work in one of the H5P objects. But if you can be a little bit creative you can get them to work, but you do also need to be mindful of things like accessibility. So they’re not always as accessible as you would like to be.

Joan: Great advice. Mahen, yourself?

Mahen: Yeah, I think H5P, as someone said, it’s quite a robust tool and I think the only cautions don’t overuse use it. Don’t have, you know, page full of these little things. If you put too much of anything, it can be bad, so don’t overdo it. But I think it has value. And think of what can students do with it and is that a valid, important part of the student learning at that point in time and then use it. But the power of H5P it’s quite I mean, it was built for teachers to build by themselves that they didn’t need a lot of support. So that’s I think the, the, the power of it. We’re having a lot more academics use it, but it’s just one tool. I mean, we have other tools as well. So, yes.

Joan: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head like the simplicity off of it as well, and not overusing anything essentially, because then it just becomes just another tool, just another tool. So using it at points in time where it’s adding to the learning experience versus taking away to it from it. Look, thank you so much for your time and talking about the project. It was really useful to gain the insights and hear how it actually came to fruition and how you’ve leveraged to H5P. To close out this podcast is there any other additional comments you would like to share with our audience?

Simone: Yeah, I guess. We’d like to acknowledge the SEI team. So they came in and helped us with the drone footage and the video footage, Stephen from that team helped us out with that. He went down for a couple of days and took all that for us and sent it through, 3D images and created a video walkthrough and there’s a 5 or 6 minute video, a traditional walk through of the house and also helped with the initial set up. Projects of this size are definitely a team effort. So it’s not just our team. And then the unit chair and their team, there’s often a lot of extended people in it.

Joan: That’s great to hear. It’s getting use across the unit and iterated upon as well. All right. Thank you for your time both. And have a lovely day. Yeah, too.