Collaborating on the Future of Learning 

John Baker

Steve Jobs once said that great things are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people. So Svein-Tore and I wanted to share our vision for the future of learning. 

I remember at the age of 8 learning to code from reading magazines dedicated to sharing examples of how to build games. Watching the internet expand and progress with people—like me—building on one another’s ideas was exciting. It opened my eyes to the potential of technology to change the world, one person at a time, and coming together in the global community. 

I have seen since the early days of the internet that sharing source code has been a key accelerant in fostering creativity, collaboration and community-powered development of our online tools and resources. And at D2L, we understand that open communities have also been at the heart of establishing open standards to foster adoption and to enable sharing and integration and build better learning experiences for people around the world.  

One critical pillar to our strategy to transform learning is making it easy to build interactive learning experiences and practices to engage and inspire learners—a vision D2L brought to life when we launched Creator+. We received tremendous feedback from early adopters and have completed efficacy studies that show its significant impact—improving completion rates and helping more students achieve As and Bs in courses while at the same time improving productivity for students and faculty. It was that success that led us to acquire H5P.  Coming together was a way for us to both accelerate impact with a shared vision for the future. 

Svein-Tore Griff With

There were a lot of redundant efforts in the world of interactive learning experiences 10 years ago. Creatives were building the same content over and over again from scratch. Software engineers were also re-implementing existing software to build classical interactives like multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank quizzes. Since its inception 10 years ago, H5P has been a community-driven open-source project aiming to build a new global standard for interactive learning experiences—all on modern web frameworks.  

For H5P, the goal has always been to foster global collaboration and reduce duplicate efforts. Looking at the global scale and commitment of the H5P community shows how successful we have been in letting the world come together to improve interactive learning. There is still much to be done, and we are looking for more engagement with the community.  

Since D2L acquired H5P, our teams have worked closely together to better integrate H5P into all major learning and publishing platforms—all to make it easier to build better learning experiences, while also honoring our commitment to ensuring an accessible learning experience for everyone.  We will continue to work hard to improve how H5P works on all platforms as we remain dedicated to keeping H5P open and cross-platform. 

H5P has always been a community-driven project, and as part of D2L, we will remain committed to those values. We will continue to empower everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content to build richer and more engaging learning experiences for people around the world. 

John Baker

Several D2L teams are beginning to make contributions to the H5P and broader open-source community, including supporting the development of accessible learning features, making select Brightspace code available on GitHub, improving documentation for developers, and contributing to the broader interoperability standards across learning platforms so that open-source solutions like H5P can seamlessly integrate with educational environments. 

At D2L, our goal is to transform the way the world learns. H5P’s capabilities, backed by an innovative and active open-source community, are integral to helping us reach more learners—across all platforms—all to help people achieve more than they ever dreamed possible. Together, we look forward to helping our users achieve great outcomes.  

We invite you to join us on this journey to build a better standard for interactive learning for everyone on the web. Learn more about D2L’s commitment to open source and visit H5P.org to see what community-driven learning can do.