H5P User Event: Scaling Up Interactive Learning and Expertise at Liverpool

Posted on: 12 January 2026 by William Moindrot in Conference & Event Reports

On Tuesday, December 3rd, 2025, we hosted our second hybrid H5P User Group meeting, with over 30 attendees from across the university, discussing and sharing practice with using H5P to make learning at Liverpool more interactive and engaging.

The event demonstrated the fantastic growth in expertise and creativity of our staff. It was clear there has been a significant uplift in the quality and effectiveness of resources produced, with staff now using H5P in very effective ways. Trond Skeie, visiting from the H5P Group, noted afterwards that he was really impressed by the range and expertise now on display at Liverpool. It is also a testament to the high-quality support we receive from H5P and their willingness to take on board feedback and ability to speedily deliver product improvements to further refine the tool to our needs.

The remainder of this blogpost provides a summary of the event. If you would like to explore using H5P within your own work please email cie@liverpool.ac.uk to apply for a free author account.

Event video recording ‘H5P User Event, 3rd Dec 2025, University of Liverpool’.

Showcase: High-Impact Use Cases

Presenters detailed the innovative ways H5P is being used to enhance student learning, address equity concerns, and integrate multimedia:

• Prof Dan Batchelor, Veterinary Science Dan showcased his interactive Game Map activity. This resource uses gamification elements like lives and points to reinforce knowledge, but its core pedagogical function is pre-testing students before lectures to boost engagement and retention. Link to video chapter.
• Dom Price, Careers & Employability Dom presented a high-quality, 70-hour virtual placement created in partnership with external organizations. Integrated within Canvas, this resource provides structured tasks and applied skills training, serving as a powerful solution to improve equity of access for placements for students who face barriers to in-person experience. Link to video chapter.
• Dr Georg Meyer, Clinical Psychology Georg demonstrated interactive videos for interview preparation and the use of 360-degree virtual tours to explore labs and departments. He highlighted the benefits of H5P's device independence, making it ideal for external and mobile users. Link to video chapter.
• Trond Skeie demonstrated new and pre-existing features that staff may not have discovered to elevate engagement in resources. He covered Pages to create eye-catching interactive columns of content useful for things like infographics, and other tips and tricks. Link to video chapter.
• Dr Rebecca Hamm and Sophie Holliday, School of Medicine Rebecca showed how her busy team uses the Smart Import feature to quickly convert recorded lectures into interactive resources, saving time for staff. Sophie provided an overview of five years of H5P use in the MBChB programme, covering resources from core science skills to clinical consultation simulations. Link to video chapter.

Discussion & Technical Nuggets

Following the presentation, discussions centered on practical challenges, advanced features, and institutional strategy, providing valuable technical tips for all users:

Student Analytics and Reporting

• A current challenge is the difficulty in capturing data of learner engagement and progression through resources. This limits the ability to use H5P for rigorous evaluation. It also limits the ability of students to return to and continue activities between sessions. Learner Reporting was part of our initial trial of H5P, and with the implementation of an enterprise license (our hope) it can return.

Design and Accessibility Tips

• Image Sizing: Getting the correct size and transparency for graphics (like Drag-and-Drop) remains a significant barrier for time and resource poor staff. A couple of workaround discussed included using Canva to prepare high quality visuals, or to arrange elements in PowerPoint and use a screen capture (e.g. Snipping tool) to create a copy for H5P. (PowerPoint imports is in the H5P roadmap Tronde tells us).
• No Undo Button: H5P editors still lack an undo button. Staff are advised to save after every few changes to avoid losing work.
• Interaction Placement: Be mindful of placing interactions too low on videos, as they can be blocked by captions on mobile devices.

Smart Import Efficiency and Updates

• Smart Import remains a popular way to quickly produce new interactive resources (quizzes etc.) based upon existing resources (PDFs, PowerPoints or Videos), but the it was noted that the AI-generated transcript from Smart Import must be carefully reviewed and edited by the academic to insure that AI generated activities focus on the content areas that they need to. It was found that sometimes questions are too easy, and is a place where further tutor input is required to modify and improve activities. A new feature has now been introduced to counter the first issue with improved focus, a ‘customization’ field at the beginning of the Smart Import process allows staff to provide ‘service information’ to specifically tell H5P how to interpret resources and what to focus on. E.g. provide learning objectives, or difficulty level.
• When a source video's duration changes, the timestamps of all H5P interactions must be manually edited to match the new recording – so only give to H5P your final video.

Future Outlook and Open Educational Resources (OER)

• Student as Producer: The ability for students to author/co-author H5P content is something current users are keen to explore further. For example setting student a coursework task in the form of an education project. This can be a key benefit of an enterprise license and something we will work towards. For an example of student work see our earlier blogpost featuring H5P examples: H5P examples so far.
• Backup Strategy: Recognising that some students prefer engaging with content in different ways, for interactive videos (e.g. lecture recordings) there is a recommendation to keep one version on Panopto ‘as-is’ and have a duplicate version for H5P.

Institutional Support and Next Steps

Laura Dickinson (IT) and Will Moindrot (CIE) provided an update on the current licensing status. There is significant momentum now at the University to position H5P as a tool staff can use in moving towards the Curriculum 2027. As part of this, an extended pilot will run in 2026/27 providing an increased number of loanable author accounts. The findings and engagement data from this phase will then be used to evaluate (alongside the pilot’s original findings) the feasibility of a full institutional license.

• Current Loan Scheme: If you would like to try H5P, the Centre for Innovation in Education and the School of Medicine have author licenses available to loan for staff experimentation. Please contact cie@liverpool.ac.uk for more details.
• Competition: Users were strongly encouraged to enter the H5P Awards to gain recognition and connect with the wider H5P community.