On Thursday, March 7th, Near-Life CEO, Mike Todd, joined channel account manager at Vyond, Corey Williams, and Sonya Trivedi, Communications Manager at Moodle, to discuss how interactive video created with tools like Vyond and Near-Life can help foster engagement and motivation throughout the learning journey.
A recording of the webinar is provided below with a transcript of Corey and Mike’s presentations following that.
An intelligent video creation tool
Corey Williams, Vyond
So Vyond, like Sonia mentioned, is an intelligent video creation tool, but we like to think of ourselves as a communication tool first.
In today’s world, your company has a lot of information that it needs to communicate and there’s a ton of different ways to communicate that information. And not all of them are as efficient as video and I’ll show you some statistics on why video is most important, but with all of these different ways, the best way to cut through and give the best information is to have an efficient communication tool.
And that’s what Vyond strives for using animated videos that are engaging and drive retention.
Video is the answer
Video is the answer to getting the communication across.
95% of information is retained when consumed through video versus 10% in text. So if you have important information that you need to get across and you’re sending it in like a lengthy article or in some type of email format, it’s not being retained as well as it would be through video.
Also through Vyond, 75% of employees are more likely to watch a video than to read text.
So if you’re looking for engagement and you’re looking for retention from the people that you’re trying to get the information to, straight from the source, employees are more likely to watch a video, especially when you think of today’s world in the modern age, we consume things through video through social media. And Vyond is relevant within that sphere as well.
Also just looking at statistics of the brain, 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. The brain is just meant to incorporate video and visuals and turn that information they’re seeing in the video into information that we can process and retain.
Vyond uses the power of AI and you can create a video in a fraction of the time that you have to spend using traditional methods. So with your traditional video-making process, you can have different stages. They can take weeks, up to months.
You’ve got your pre-production. That goes into getting approval for concepts, getting your script created. That’s a huge time suck. You also have the production of setting up the sound, the lighting, you’ve got post production with editing and adding video.
Now you might have a review process where people have to go through and look at the edits and make more approvals and, again, this can take weeks or months.
With Vyond, we cut through all of that to allow you to make a video that is easy to create and easy to use and easy to update. And we can cut that time down from a couple weeks or a couple months into a couple hours.
Using the power of AI, which I’ll show you in a minute. You can create a video within seconds, edit the script and then fully customize that video with content that you want. And you can do that an unlimited amount of times.
So rather than having months or weeks to work with one video and the time and money that comes with that, you can do this over and over again and translate into any language, not any language, but 70 plus languages that we have in our database. And again, that’s gonna save you not just time, but money that you can repeatedly do over and over again.
Some of the ways that animated video is going to drive better engagement, Vyond has tens of thousands of different assets, characters, and props that we can add into video to make them more engaging and make any idea that you have come to life.
If you’re a health care company and you want to set up a scene within a doctor’s office, we can do that for you. If your company wants to drive across the point of having better diversity within a workplace, you can create any character that you want in any element that you want. And you can go in and review and update and edit anything very quickly with just a couple clicks of a button and add any props or make any changes that you want just by clicking around. It’s very intuitive.
Vyond Go
I want to show you our AI. It’s called Vyond Go and it allows you to put in a simple prompt and then you can create a video within a couple of seconds. If you guys go to our homepage at Vyond and you go over here to create or you can go over here, create with AI and you put in a simple prompt, right here. With the AI, you can even put in an article.
You have 4,000 characters to put in here. So if you have an interesting article that you find online and you want to create a video out of that you can copy and paste that entire article.
Put it in the topic and Vyond Go will create a video for you. So I’ve mentioned healthcare and I’ve got an example of health care later, so I could just do… let’s say we want to make a video about policies around smoking near hospitals. You can change the layout as well: if you want to make it conversational or if you want to have it informational or you just want someone to narrate it.
So with this, it’s centered around healthcare, I can select a healthcare scene with a character already pre-made. And then I can change the language that I want it to be in and you can see we have a ton of different options.
So, if I want to keep it English, I can choose a dialect: UK, United States, Philippines, Singapore, all of the above.And then you just click: create this video.
It takes about 30 seconds, but our AI will take your topic with the scene that you want with the language selected and create a video and a script for you. And then once you have that video and the script, you’ll be able to go in, view the video and make any changes to the script that you want in real time and the video will reflect those changes.
So let me know if anyone has any trouble hearing this, but I’ll play the video for you just to see how quickly we created a video and if you remember those traditional methods I mentioned before, you’ll see just how fast this is.
Great. So as you saw as the video was playing, I was going through the script over here on the right and you could see it talking. So let’s say I wanted to go back through the video and I want to change how this looks. Instead of saying “Policies Around Smoking Near Hospitals”, I can just say, “Hospital Policy Around Smoking.” And if I want her to save something different in the video, I can also go in here [edits text in speech prompt]. So as soon as I click out of it, it makes the changes. All those changes are now implemented.
You can see the very beginning right here, “Hospital Policy Around Smoking” was the change that I made there and then I made a change, ‘Are you tired of walking through smoke near your hospital?”
So you can make changes to the script in real time and then you’d be able to go in here and you’d fully be able to edit the video in Vyond studio.
What that means is you can go in there and you can add any props, you can add any characters, you can add any assets, you can change the music, the background, and you can add to the script and make the video longer.
What Vyond Go and our AI is meant to do is give you a starting block that you can fully customise and then go in and make the video your own. After you have that starting block within just a couple of minutes, you can get a finished product by editing in studio that could look something like this. [shows short clip of customer video]
This is an actual video that was created by a Vyond customer, Sandwell and West Birmingham, NHS Trust, to create a policy of non-smoking around their hospital grounds. And again, this is something you could start with Vyond Go with the video that I showed you and then make the full video with edits and studio to make yourself a fully engaging video that gets across your policies with an animated video using Vyond.
Now with our partnership with Near-Life, what you’re actually able to do is gamify your videos. You can make a video in Vyond then with Near-Life you could go in and make your video interactive.
With an interactive video, you get more engagement because people are actually clicking and interacting with the video, which leads to more retention and more engagement through your employees and the people that you want the information to get to. So I will kick it off to Mike and let him discuss how Near-Life can also help with more engaging videos.
Combining the tools
Mike Todd, Near-Life
We’ve been having a collaboration with both Vyond and Moodle for a number of years now and we found that, and I think Vyond have found the same, that there’s a lot of mutually beneficial outcomes that can be achieved by putting the tools together.
I’m going to talk a little bit more about the interactive side. You’ve seen how easy it is to create your videos using a tool like Vyond: how simple and straightforward, especially with the AI generation that they now offer. So, why consider making the video interactive? Well, I’ll just really talk you through some of the benefits and give you a few tips on how you can start to look at creating your own interactive projects.
So why think about interactive content? Well, you’ve learned all about the benefits that video offers, obviously it’s a great way to communicate video, but if you add interaction you can actually enhance the engagement even further. And it’s really an extension of a lot of established theories in learning and elsewhere around the idea of gamification. You’ve got principles around branching scenarios; that you are able to put people in a position to make choices to engage more with the content that they see. And, the knowledge retention increases.
And in fact, if you’re actually translating face to face activities that require engagement into an online environment you can potentially lower cost. We know from research, it’s been shown that using this kind of interactive and immersive approach can actually improve knowledge retention by as much as 90%. So significant, significant numbers really.
And you can safely fail. I mean, you can make choices, make decisions and you can play around really in a gamified way; in a safe environment.
The right approach
So what would the right approach be for your interactive video? Well, there are different ways you can approach it.
Interactive is a fairly broad umbrella term and it covers quite a few different, quite distinct use cases. Very popular, that we see in terms of applying Vyond with our tool, is one around decision-based branching.
Branching scenarios is a well-established area now in learning; this idea that you make choices and see the outcomes based on those choices you make. Well, that’s very simple to do using the video creation tools that something like Vyond offers and combined with our tool you can design and create projects very easily.
You’ve also got the ability to have interactive quizzes, again, using something like Vyond and you saw some of the gamified templates there at the end that Vyond have. They’ve got so many different available themes and ideas that you can try and translate into simple quizzes and characters. So you can just have quizzes and also, you can make more complex gamified options.
We did a promotion, I think, with Vyond, I’ve not got it for this webinar, around Halloween last year and it was really like a mini adventure game where you could make choices, you could find objects.
So you’ve really got the ability to pick the appropriate route for your own interactive project, depending on the outcomes you’re looking for. But, another one that we will see, you’ve got use cases where you can perhaps just explore a topic, just make it a clickable video.
And onboarding, which we will see an example of, is a great case in point in that you could maybe see about the company’s policies or explore their health and safety rules or whatever it might be but you can really just have a more engaging approach if you add the interaction.
The design process
We’ve seen how easy it is to create the videos, using Vyond. If we were discussing interactive projects with some of our community, this is a very top level approach that we might suggest.
Obviously, most people on the webinar, I’m assuming, are in learning/ education in some form or more broadly in communication. Well, if you have learning objectives, then that can form a basis for having what we would call a story workshop. So if you are having a kind of a narrative project, decision-based scenario, then you can use that type of engagement to have a workshop. How’s this going to be implemented in real life? How are we going to translate our learning objects into a dynamic video-based learning exercise?
And it could all inform the story document that we suggest could be the type of document that might inform your Vyond AI generation, for example. A lot of the thinking with interactive projects happens upfront before you get to the building stage. If you’ve got the thinking in place, it’s very easy to build out your game diagram and to get your script and your media production using Vyond. It’s very simple.
So that’s really just a very top level overview. I actually am skipping through those slides because I just want to show you some of the basic ideas around how it’s implemented because I think seeing this thing in practice is more helpful than me talking about it.
I’ll just skip into the on tool here. So the one I had up on the screen there is a project by an organization called St. John Ambulance here in the UK. They are a leading provider of first aid training. And this was a simple scenario that they created around advice if you see somebody choking.
This is a game diagram built out and the way our tool works, the way it supports something like Vyond is that you can quickly build out your game diagram. So I can drag and drop these graph nodes, set up the structure I want and I can add overlays around decision choices. I can add button options. I can choose what happens, where they will go to, I can connect them… You can have hotspot areas. Oh, there’s a lot you can do, but basically it’s really working on the basis of overlays.
If you build a diagram here with different choices, different pathways, then you would simply create your videos, whatever your design process, whether it’s the one I was outlining before, whatever approach you take, could create your videos in Vyond and you just simply drag and drop them into the established diagram.
I won’t go through the whole scenario, but it’s basically a classic branching scenario whereby you’re presented with an event or presented with a scene and then you’re going to make choices and the story or the interactions will unfold accordingly. That would be a classic use case one: a branching scenario.
I’ll just show you one a little bit more gamified, there’s one here that’s around cybersecurity.
You can see here again, these are the types of creative templates that you can get in Vyond. This is using an alien space theme. You can see options around the choices you make and you can choose, you can kind of add progress bars.
So this is much more gamified, includes quizzes and you can see the structure therefore a little bit more involved. And everyone’s kind of going through the same section. You’ve got a lot of flexibility in terms of what you create and this one in particular uses achievements and conditions. I won’t go through the details, it can get a little bit complicated but basically it will track the choice, it doesn’t need to be like what we saw earlier: choice leading to an outcome or straightforward branching. Rather, you can track achievements and kind of change what happens according to the choices people make by following and tracking the achievements across the whole scenario. So this is a good example that I think of where you can get creative with your themes, about a fairly dry topic, very important with cybersecurity, but you can create a more game-based feel to it all.
We won’t play the whole thing, but you get the idea. It’s much more of a kind of a game-based, quiz-based exercise using the kind of creative templates that Vyond offers.
I’ll just show you one final example, this is again using templates that Vyond offers – a great range of very specific templates they have. So this is onboarding. This is using Vyond’s particular onboarding templates but you can see the design here is more of what I would call an explorer graph rather than just a branching scenario where you’re going from A to B to C and making your choices.
You can explore the different options from, effectively, a home screen.
So you can see here, this would give you an example of where you can explore the topics around onboarding. It doesn’t have to be just one straightforward linear progression in terms of interactive narrative, but rather, you can explore a topic like onboarding. So that would be another kind of case study.
Sharing
When you’ve created your scenarios, obviously we’re here with Moodle, we’re very proud to be a certified integration partner with Moodle, you simply publish on the tool and you can share using a few options: you can do an LTI integration with Moodle that’s very simple, you just get a simple code, I’ll show you in a moment, you put that into your Moodle environment. You can integrate these interactive experiences in your LMS very easily. And you can add things like score, so you can set a pass, and you can use SCORM, and even you can use xAPI.
A public example
So it’s very much about making the integration easier and you can actually even share, if you wanted to have a go on one of these one of our customers kindly allowed us to flag this during this tour but one of our users, who uses both Vyond and Near-Life, they did a project in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control in the US. If you want to have a play around there is one available that is a slightly different use case to the ones I’ve shown in that you’ve got to click on different options in the rooms. How To Read A Disinfectant Label Interactive Training
This example shows that it can also be embedded in a public facing place. You might be promoting a course, so you show an interactive Vyond exercise and then within your LMS you’ve got the full one. But you can embed anyway using LTI to integrate within Moodle or even just embed that as an interactive video experience.
There’s a lot more we could go into, but this is just a webinar to give you a few ideas if you approach an interactive concept for the first time.
Questions
Following the presentations, Sonya moderated a Q&A session. You can view the questions and responses from 26:07.
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