Aggregation: An H5P Superpower for combining features

H5P Activity Types are like modular, pre-made building blocks, managed and distributed by H5P from a worldwide community of developers. You can add activities individually, or you can combine them to create richer challenges for your learners.

Aggregation is a Superpower

Some H5P activities are actually aggregators. Each aggregator activity in H5P can contain other H5P activities in it. This lets you combine activities to create more complex challenges, with richer presentations.

For example:

• Column lets you combine up to 26 H5P activities in a vertical sequence (similar in shape to a Moodle Quiz)
• Course Presentation lets you combine almost 20 kinds of H5P activities into a slideshow format (similar to PowerPoint).
• Interactive Book lets you combine many kinds of H5P activities into a book-like format (similar to Moodle's Book Module).
• Interactive Video lets you apply up to 16 H5P activities as overlays during video playback, letting you pause and challenge Students while they watch.
• Quiz (Question Set) lets you combine 7 different question types into a continuous sequence.

Which Aggregator to use

At VCC, the most popular aggregator activity in H5P has been "Course Presentation", although "Column", "Interactive Video", and "Interactive Book" are all well-used. It's really up to you which content you put into your activities, and how you decide to combine them to create complex challenges for your students.

How Grades are aggregated

The ability for H5P activities to be combined inside each other is immensely powerful. The features of each activity gets combined inside another, potentially creating layers of activities, one inside the other. Think of an image of Russian nesting dolls, with one figure inside another, inside another, etc.

But what does that mean for all the marks that the Student earns in each nested activity? How do the grades earned from multiple H5P activities get aggregated and recorded in the gradebook?

The way it's handled is like this: all the marks earned by a student who completes each nested activity will get combined into a total of marks, and recorded as a value out of the maximum grade of the outermost activity.

So, if an H5P Interactive Book contains three quizzes, each worth 15 marks, the student may have earned up to 45 marks from H5P if they were to ace all those quizzes. However, the Interactive Book itself may only have a maximum grade of 10 marks, so the 45/45 earned by all the H5P quizzes in the book will get boiled down to a 10/10 overall mark for all the activities contained in the Book. The Book, as the outermost containing activity is the grade that gets recorded in Moodle's Gradebook.

H5P Aggregations Overview Chart

See which H5P aggregators (across the top) can contain other H5P activities:

• More about Aggregation and other H5P special features:
  https://humtech.ucla.edu/instruction/top-5-hidden-features-h5p/