American College of Education Creates High-Quality, High-Volume eLearning with Vyond

Vyond videos get 5–10% higher engagement and completion rates

About American College of Education

American College of Education (ACE) is a private online college with headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a Certified B Corporation, ACE follows the B Corp standards of social and environmental performance, positive impact on employees and customers, and public transparency. The school is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and offers programs focused on education, business, healthcare, and nursing.

Industry

Higher education

Employees

500+

Challenge

The curriculum development and production team at American College of Education (ACE) has a challenging mission to deliver engaging content efficiently for a diverse student body across all of ACE’s 50+ online, year-round degree programs.

Traditional methods like PowerPoint and standalone talking-head videos lacked the engagement modern learners seek. And they were too time-consuming for a curriculum production team responsible for delivering high volumes of content. “There are times we’re rolling out ten courses in six weeks,” says Monica Speer, Assistant Manager of Learning Design.

Monica and her team needed a solution to help them create and update content quickly while upholding ACE’s high standards for instructional design and engagement. “We don’t have months to create a course,” Monica says. “We need to move quickly and deliver top quality, so we went with Vyond.”

Approach

The curriculum development team works with academics and provides Monica and her team video scripts (20+ pages) for the courses; sometimes, studio-quality talking-head presentation footage is provided, too. From these materials, the team builds multimedia content courses, each comprising 20 Vyond videos on average, including text, audio, and images to reinforce important points or help visualize processes.

“We also use characters and stories wherever we can to make the content more relatable and interesting for students,” says Kelsey Corder, an eLearning content designer. “And we always try to tailor the content to their future industries, using different scene templates, or creating them with the expansive prop library, to help reflect the nuances within, say, healthcare versus health education versus health financing.”

The curriculum development and production process repeats regularly as new programs and courses are developed and existing courses are revised. At the busiest times, the team works on Vyond content eight hours a day, with a goal to each produce two videos daily.

How Vyond helped

With Vyond, the ACE team can create 100+ videos each five-week term and keep their curriculum current, engaging — and accurate. “We’re an accredited college and our multimedia content follows the approved script to ensure alignment with student outcomes for the courses,” Monica says.

On the learner side, the results have been tangible. “Our LMS analytics show that students are more engaged with our Vyond course content,” says Scott Dowling, eLearning content designer. “We see five to ten percent higher student engagement and video-completion rates, on average, for videos produced using Vyond.”

On the production side, the team says Vyond’s templates and collaboration features have been a timesaver given their high volume and fast turnarounds. “We’ve created a huge library of ACE scenes that apply across courses. Everybody shares as we go, and we give assets easily searchable names. The shared library has been a lifesaver,” says Kelsey.

Beyond curriculum content, ACE keeps finding new ways to use Vyond: such as making their commencement event accessible and inclusive during the pandemic. “We created virtual commencement videos in Vyond, allowing graduates to see their names, hear their names being called, and experience a sense of ceremony,” says Monica. “Now it’s become a tradition.”