5 Tools You Can Use to Create Interactive Content In Your LMS

The days when education happened only within the four walls of a classroom, with a teacher talking non-stop in front of a chalkboard, seem long gone. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine education without a screen, whether that’s in higher education institutions or corporate training. Technologies like Learning Management Systems (LMSs) have impacted and revolutionized every aspect of learning. But, are you realizing this technology’s full potential?

When learning technology first squeezed into classrooms and workplaces, it focused on creating a digital copy of traditional education. A lecture became a video, a textbook turned into a PDF, a test became a form. However, educators and L&D professionals now realize that technology has much more to offer. A whole layer of interactivity appears if you have the right tools, and you know how to use them.

A number of great interactive features are already available in  Moodle™-based LMSs. This article covers how to leverage those tools to create meaningful and engaging learning experiences.

Make the Most Out of LMS Technology

You will have to rethink the current pedagogical methods using the value of digital media. Education should trigger learners’ curiosity and provide them with opportunities to take a leading role in the experience.

A great tool available within Moodle™-based LMSs such as Open LMS is H5P. H5P allows you to create, share, and reuse interactive HTML5 content. It’s easy to use and browser-based, meaning that learners don’t need to install anything.

H5P lets you enhance learners’ experience with fun and modern formats. Let’s take a look at how this and other tools can change your learning game!

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1. Interactive Video

With people’s attention spans decreasing, how long do you think someone can pay attention to a video for, without getting distracted? Videos in education and learning ore generally are great, but they can have so much more depth if you add interactions to them—and you can do just that using H5P!

Videos enriched with interactions totally change the learning experience. With H5P, you can transform viewing a video from a passive act to an active one by embedding any of the following interactions into the video itself:

• True or false activities
• Quizzes
• Tables
• Hotspots
• Bookmarks
• Drag and drops
• Multiple choice questions

There are two ways of working with H5P within Open LMS specifically. You can have an H5P file ready to upload and Open LMS will seamlessly integrate it into your environments. But you can also create it from scratch on the platform!

To do this, choose the “interactive video” content type when uploading a video. This will allow you to add a file (or YouTube link!), and then move through the video to add all the previously mentioned interactions.

Beyond turning a simple video into an interactive experience, you can also guarantee better content retention. If a quiz answer is wrong, for example, you can set it up so that the learners have to repeat the part of the video that contains the correct answer.

2. Engaging Presentations

In a digital environment, educators and L&D professionals must avoid having learners just sitting and absorbing information. Rather than merely feeding them learning content, they want to involve them. With H5P, you can create interactive and fully-featured eLearning courses complete with various multimedia and interactive elements to engage your learners.

Within Open LMS, you can navigate through the different screens and add various interactive multimedia elements such as quizzes or progress bars to make sure your learners are getting the right answers. In the same manner, you can create branching scenarios with dilemmas and self-paced learning.

3. Grades and Completion Tracking

Something worth highlighting about H5P is that all the aforementioned activities can be included in student grade books and other records. So instead of just having a test to evaluate the learner’s performance, you can add the results from quizzes and other interactive elements to their records. Of course, this only works when using H5P as part of the overall assessment. High-stake assessments should use solutions that offer more security, such as Open LMS Online Exams.

The technology also provides instructors with useful analytics: They can review learner performance or view individual interactions throughout the course. Then, they can use the data to decide which parts of the content need to change, and use it to shape the learning engagement strategy.

4. Glossaries to Encourage Community

Although glossaries aren’t exclusive to H5P-enabled courses, they’re a good LMS tool to stimulate interaction. Besides engagement, educators and L&D professionals should aspire to getting learners so involved in the course that they then create and share their own content within the platform.

People might think a glossary is just a list of definitions or explanations. On the contrary, you can think about it as a tool that allows learners to add entries and form a community within the LMS. You can even use a glossary as a reference page where learners can add their own references.

In a Moodle™-based LMS, a glossary turns into a space to express and discuss ideas with the input of the learners, especially with functionality such as:

• The ability to choose between automatically approving entries or holding them for approval and editing
• Automatic linking of entries to relevant topics within the course
• Comments and ratings to encourage interaction with the best contributions
• A powerful search function

5. Databases Created by Your Learners

“Databases” may sound like a technical and scary term, but this tool also enables learners to create their own content. A user-created database could become a powerful resource for learners to upload examples of a specific topic.

For example, in a digital photography course, learners could upload their own examples of macro photos in a database, explaining the process of how they took them. Then, other learners can search through all of the examples in the database for inspiration, and they can even rate their peers' work, which encourages interactions between learners and incentivises the sharing of more content.

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Behind these tools sit many modern pedagogies such as inquiry-based learning, active learning, collaborative learning, and social learning. You can incorporate any and all of these elements into your curriculum and have the confidence that a Moodle™-based platform such as Open LMS will give you the tools to support your approach.