What is H5P Smart Import?
In my previous post ‘Keep Learners Awake with H5P’‘, I shared information about H5P and how it can be used to make online learning more interactive (interactive in terms of challenging thinking, not interactive for interaction’s sake – for the critics out there, there is a very big difference!). H5P Smart Import was released earlier this year. Smart Import is a content creation tool that harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to streamline the process of generating interactive educational content. How does it work – well you guessed, the latest version is powered by GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) technology.
In short, the tool is designed to work with structured, factual, and informative content that contains explicit knowledge. It allows users to upload files, paste text, or provide a website link and then utilises AI to analyse and enhance the provided content.
Here is a quick (and informal) overview of how to use H5P Smart Import and a quick look at the content it generates:
Benefits
H5P Smart Import offers a range of benefits for educators and content creators. Some of its key advantages include:
- One of the biggest benefits is efficiency. Smart Import automates the analysis of content, significantly reducing the time and effort required to create interactive learning materials. It does this by automatically identifying the main concepts and developing content around them.
- However, it is not just the development of the actual activities that can save an educator time, Smart Import can be used to quickly review, summarise and highlight key points so an educator can quickly review content that is worth spending more time on and content that is likely to be less useful. Smart Import can do the first check for you.
- Smart Import supports various interactive activities, including crosswords, question sets, drag-and-drop exercises, dialogue cards, interactive videos, accordions, summaries, and interactive books. This versatility and speed allow educators who have previously felt their technology skills were limited, to develop an editable version of an interactive online resource with ease.
Whether you choose to use the interactive activity exactly as it was intended or use the information provided in another way, it is likely to save you time; multiple choice questions, summaries, key points and glossaries can be created for you exceptionally quickly to edit and refine in whatever format you decide to use them.
Areas for Improvement
While H5P Smart Import is a powerful tool, there are areas for improvement or to watch out for:
- Capitalisation accuracy: The tool may have inaccuracies in capitalising titles.
- American spelling: Smart Import predominantly uses American spelling, which may not align with our preferences.
- Question set similarity: As highlighted in the video, there might be instances where question sets have similar questions presented in different formats.
- Vague questions in dialogue cards: In some cases, dialogue cards may pose a question on one side, suggesting the answer will be on the other side, but the answer on the flip side does not correlate (would confuse).
- Excessive explanation in interactive videos: As mentioned in the video, interactive videos may contain too many pop-up terms (but these can be quickly deleted).
- Knowledge acquisition orientation: Question sets are primarily knowledge acquisition-oriented, and users should check and modify them as needed for effective learning outcomes.
Cost
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to get free long-term use of Smart Import. However, H5P.com have a range of subscription options for teams of three and up. I contacted the H5P Core Team to get a free trial after a H5P ambassador drew our attention to the feature (Kate Molloy) and they were very responsive, so if you think this is something that would benefit your setting, have a look at the options on the H5P.com website.
Conclusion
In conclusion, H5P Smart Import is a valuable tool for educators seeking an efficient and AI-driven solution for creating interactive content. While it presents areas for improvement, its benefits in terms of time-saving and versatile activity options make it a valuable tool to, at the very least, explore further. Is AI creating learning activities a step too far – I do not think so. This technology, or similar, is likely to become commonplace in education – keep trialling, testing and sharing what works!