Frequently asked questions
1. What is Edlib and how does it work?
Edlib is an open-source platform for creating, sharing, storing and using rich interactive learning resources. Edlib allows anyone to create —and subsequently manage and reuse— highly interactive H5P-based learning resources. The H5P platform provides a large collection of interactive and rich content types for the purpose of learning.
Edlib can be integrated against the learning management system (LMS) of your choice by means of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) education technology specification. Through LTI you can track results directly in your LMS.
Edlib is continuously evolving with existing features being refined and new features being added. The following is a list of major features, several of which are in active development:
- Support for all H5P open-source content types.
- Content explorer to easily find and re-use existing Edlib content. Content can be filtered by H5P content type, tags, Creative-Commons license and so forth.
- Create content-by-URL: the ability to point to an existing (publicly available) resource and turn it into an Edlib-based learning resource.
- Licensing module with an intelligent Creative-Commons license selector.
- Authoring workflows including the ability to maintain resources private or to make them publicly available.
- Collaboration functionality for content creators.
- Easy integration with third-party APIs including audio, video and image APIs.
- The ability to create quizzes and game-based learning activities quickly and easily from the integrated question bank.
- Resource versioning.
- The ability to easily and quickly create language variants of the same resource.
2. Who is Edlib for?
Edlib is suitable for anyone including, but not limited to, schools and businesses that need to make truly engaging educational resources available to their students through an LMS.
3. Why should I use Edlib?
Experience —together with research— shows that an increased level of meaningful interactions lead to a higher level of engagement which, in turn, leads to increased motiviation ultimately resulting in a more positive learning outcome for the learner.
Edlib is continuously being battle-tested with our own educational applications Gamilab and NDLA, a gamification application and online education platform, respectively. Initially, we developed Edlib primarily for our own needs but, at some point, came to realise the usefulness of Edlib for other people, as well. Edlib truly provides everything you need to create, manage and make available highly interactive and engaging educational resources to your students.
4. Is Edlib free?
Edlib is an GPL 3.0-licensed open-source project, meaning that you can fork and clone the project, build it, deploy it and subsequently host it for yourself without us charging you anything to do so. Alternatively, you could also get in touch with us to help you out with getting Edlib up and running. We would genuinely be happy to help.
5. How do I start using Edlib?
You'll need to fork and clone the Edlib GitHub repository. Edlib follows the so-called monorepo development strategy meaning that it contains everything (from a source-code point of view) to get up and running.
You can find documentation on how to build and deploy Edlib —from source— in the Developers section of the menu.