CREATING INTERACTIVE FEATURES FOR OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE GEOSCIENCES: THE END OF ADOBE FLASH AND THE RISE OF H5P

Science learning is most effective when concepts and theories are explained visually and practiced with hands-on laboratory activities (Choque-Velasquez et al. 2017; Rapp et al. 2016). Interactive media provide cognitive support by guiding learning activities and reflection, providing instant feedback, allowing student control of learning pace and content presentation, and pre-training students. This can increase self-regulated learning abilities (Moreno & Mayer 2007; Schmidt-McCormack et al. 2017). Open Educational Resources (OER) in science education enable low or no-cost access to digital learning materials and allow instructors to reuse and remix them according to pedagogical needs (Wiley et al. 2012). Based upon this cognitive rationale, we developed interactive content for modules within two OER geoscience textbooks: Introduction to Petrology, developed through the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA); and Analytical Methods in the Geosciences (AMiGEO), supported by the NSF IUSE program. In this presentation we document the challenges of creating and transferring interactive media for OER, as well as the necessary progression from Adobe Flash to HTML5. When the AMiGEO project began in 2016, interactive Flash diagrams were commonly used. We used Animate from the Adobe Creative Cloud suite to create interactive objects. Links to Flash objects hosted in Weebly could be embedded within the WordPress-based Lumen Learning OER publishing platform. We found that students had difficulty using these diagrams because Flash was increasingly blocked by default on many web browsers. Upon launching the Petrology OER project in 2019, we were able to use H5P as a plug-in for the VIVA Pressbooks platform. H5P offers more than 40 templates for interactive objects, including media presentations, games, and questions. These templates inspired the creation of more than 30 interactive items for the VIVA Petrology book. The objects were collaboratively created by a scientist, instructional designer, and media specialist. Documentation of the creation and purpose of items were found to be critical to the success of embedding interactive items into the OER. Challenges with H5P include meaningful interactivity, transferability among platforms, and tracking text and sub-objects used to create interactive media.