Interactive Multimedia Activities with Open-Source Software: Practices and Challenges of Integrating Lumi Education's activities in Brightspace LMS

The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate how open-source software like Lumi can rival expensive applications in creating interactive multimedia activities for Brightspace, the University of Limerick's Learning Management System. In this workshop, we will work with Lumi, a desktop editor app that offers a collection of tools to create, edit, and share multimedia activities. Lumi features a responsive design, allowing students to use it on their mobile phones or laptops and uses H5P, a standard markup language used to structure and present content based on JavaScript. Research by Triana, Maksum, and Nurhasanah (2023) and Briggs & Doran (2024) has demonstrated that interactive activities created with Lumi Education improve students’ motivation and engagement with assessment activities, as well as effective reading comprehension over content presented in PowerPoint.
The workshop covers first the creation of interactive activities. Participants will learn to create activities in various formats, such as interactive books, columns, or presentations using Lumi Education, and how to integrate them in Brightspace and link them to the grade book in Brightspace. Secondly, good practices for designing multimedia content, troubleshooting issues, and understanding the limitations of Lumi will be discussed based on the experience during the first phase of a pilot project in a module of Spanish for Business, in which Lumi was used to design graded asynchronous activities for improving listening skills and vocabulary in business students learning Spanish as a foreign language.
By the end of this workshop, participants will have hands-on experience and practical knowledge to implement these techniques in their educational settings.