How APA reduces time by 50% to create Coursera training videos

We spoke with Peter Cardamone, Instructional Design Manager at the American Psychological Association (APA). He shared how Synthesia's AI video allowed him to develop APA training content for online training platforms like Coursera and edX.

The Challenge

Peter and his team are responsible for creating modules in an adaptive learning platform for universities but recently also started to create content for online learning platforms like Coursera and EdX given their large and broad audiences.

The nature of these platforms is very video heavy, so the APA team had the challenge to re-create a lot of his existing content into video. This turned out to be a challenge for several reasons:

Time-Consuming: Looking into using animation platforms or actually shooting video, it would take a long time to create video at the scale that was necessary to populate 9 courses and about 100 sections with video.

Lack of Flexibility: If any updates are needed for published learning courses, they would require re-recordings and updates to the SRT files.

Hard to scale: Considering the need to convert all learning interactives into video within just 4 months, it was too time-consuming and demanding to accomplish this with self-recorded voice overs and traditional video editing tools.

Our interactive learning modules were not usable for the new platforms. With a small team, we had to convert 500 modules into videos, a process that involved recording and captioning, which was highly time-consuming.- Peter Cardamone, Instructional Design Manager

The Solution

Given that Peter and his team already had a lot of learning material available that needed to be updated into video format, the process was very straightforward.

Peter uploaded the scripts to Synthesia, added content and avatars, and voilà - the video was ready to be generated and the team uploaded it to Coursera or edX.

Here's what we appreciate most about Synthesia:

Text to Speech: Generating speech from written text has saved significant time compared to the traditional video production process used by the team.

Automated Subtitles: Synthesia offers automated subtitles in over 120 languages, reducing the team's manual workload.

Ease of use: The platform is user-friendly, providing all essential video editing features to produce top-notch learning content videos, with no additional tools or editing expertise required.

We no longer need to worry about SRT files or voiceovers. We can use the tool to produce a high-quality video quickly. - Peter Cardamone, Instructional Design Manager

The Results

With Synthesia in their toolbox, Peter and his team have started creating learning videos quicker than ever before, yielding impressive results:

Video at scale: In just 4 months, the team turned 100s of Storyline modules into Synthesia videos and launched 9 courses across Coursera and edX.

Time savings: Thanks to Synthesia, Peter and his team were able to save 50% of the time in video creation compared to using other tools or self-recording.

High course conversions: The monthly course conversion rate of 20-30% greatly surpasses the usual 5-10% seen on platforms like Coursera.

With our former process of recording voice overs and creating cartoons using animation tools, it would have taken us a week per video. Now with Synthesia, I can produce two videos a day.- Peter Cardamone, Instructional Design Manager