Project description
My project is to create an interactive experience for new students who have not got a chance to explore the MIIS campus yet. I remember I was showing my roommate, a first-year student, the shortcuts to downtown Monterey and my favorite places in town. It occurred to me that when I got to the school, my friends and some second-year students showed me around. However, during the remote settings, the new students may not get a chance to explore what the student life would be like at MIIS, so I was hoping to create this experience in English as a role-playing game and localize the “e-Learning” activity into simplified Chinese.
Choosing the right tool
For this project, I used H5P “interactive course” because based on my previous experience, it is a great tool for interactivity (see example here). During my internship at Digital Learning & Inquiry at MIIS, we supported the Middlebury School in Jordan to create a pre-immersion site and we used H5P for language-teaching and interactive tours to the Jordan cultures. (see examples here and here).
The “Go to slide” feature in H5P is quite helpful, and the players would be able to navigate between pages and explore a MIIS life based on the choices they selected.
H5P has many templates such as flashcards, fill in the blanks, interactive video, etc. that would make the e-learning engaging and dynamic. However, it is not built as a design tool in its nature. The font and shape choices are relatively limited, and I could not export the texts for translation (except copying and pasting). So I had to rely heavily on Canva and Photoshop for the visuals, which made the localization experience quite manual and also added up the time for DTP.
H5P has great templates that would create a great visual experience for language teaching or interactive e-learning, which makes it a great tool for instructional design. However, it may not be customizable enough for a localization project.
From the perspectives of a localizer, it might be more cost-effective to create an e-learning experience in Adobe Captivate (even though this may lead to more learning curves) or even PowerPoint. With Adobe Captivate, users are able to add animation, insert ongoing background music and dubbing clips, add captions, and especially, export the texts so that the localizers can translate in CAT tools and import the translation. This would make the localization process more scalable from the project management perspective.
Interactivity vs. localization
One challenge I faced was to make the game more interactive. I think for asynchronous content, it would be more attention-seeking if it has audio or visual content. Unfortunately, in H5P, the audio would not continue to play in the following slides, but it would only work on one slide. So I was not able to add background music. It would be really great if I could animate the dialogues so visually it would look more like a live conversation. If I had the time, I think it would also create a more comprehensive experience if I could record the dialogue in English and dub it into Chinese.
It would be really great if localization features or API solutions can be enabled in the design tools in the future. This can include making the texts exportable and providing more fonts and design ideas. It would also be great to enable RTL support or special characters in more locales so that the designers in the world can also have the opportunity to create e-learning content, and the design process can be more inclusive.
Please feel free to click here and start your MIIS journey!
* Note: You can click on “reuse” at the bottom and download the H5P content, or embed in your WordPress webpage by clicking on “embed” (you will need to activate the H5P plugin on your WordPress site to embed the content).