If you’re in the learning and education space, you know how competitive it is.

Your audience has a broad range of options when it comes to browsing for content on the internet. They can get information about any given topic from a number of websites and publications. So, what makes your learning experiences stand out? Why should someone choose your site over another?

Content is the key to drawing your visitors in. You need to put your best foot forward if your students to stick around and return again and again. Short videos and online classes are the base of the learning process today. Video content can have a large effect on student engagement as they provide something unique and visual elements and interactive features so they won’t be able to look away.

Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why video parts in the curricula for student learning are a must-have for for anyone working with learning and education.

Video content for learning and education  is a new visual channel to stand out

If you want to make sure your website or course gets noticed, you need to make sure your content is easily distinguishable from the rest. Video for learning and education is an excellent way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

It’s the perfect way to make your content stand out from the rest because of two main reasons:

• Video content has not been part of traditional courses. It’s not something that’s used enough  on education and learning websites, considering how effective educational videos are in getting thourgh important information and include visual elements in the curricula. 
• Video content can be incredibly engaging, entertaining, contributes to active learning, helps working memory, and overall supports student learning. Consequently, it means visitors will be drawn to it like a magnet and will want to stick around. They won’t be able to look away because your video content will be so captivating and engaging even more so with interactive features and compelling visual elements. Utilizing video will help you reach the desired learning outcome with less cognitive effort from the student's side, while the length of time students spend studying can be also reduced. 

Cognitive load theory has important implications to this point. The theory refers to the amount of working memory resources used. Earlier research suggests, the fundamental tenet of cognitive load theory is that the quality of instructional design will be raised if greater consideration is given to the role and limitations of working memory. With increased distractions, particularly from cell phone use, students are more prone to experiencing high cognitive load which can reduce academic success. 

People love video content

People have a general love for video content. It’s a natural human instinct to want to see visuals along with content.

This is especially true when it comes to topics like education and learning. Student engagement through video can be increased with the concepts being taught come to life in front of their eyes. Visually appealing video design is the way to go if you want to hook your viewers and reel them in. Studies show that productive use of video supports the retention of more information from video content than from written articles, while reducing the cognitive load.

Visuals inspire working memory and sensory memory to contribute to remember additional information afterwards. It’s a great way to make sure your visitors get the extra information they want from your website and then some. If you want to make sure your readers remember what they’re reading, you need to make sure your content has visuals accompanying it. This is where video content comes in handy. It’s a great way to make sure your viewers understand the content and learn from it.

Video can teach while keeping people entertained

If you want to make sure your visitors are captivated and eager for more, video is the way to go. You can have a variety of video content on your site to cater to different learning styles using informal and formal language, different video design and types of segmenting your content. This way, your content is accessible to a larger audience.

If you’re not sure what kind of video content to include on your website, it’s best to stick with the tried-and-true methods of teaching like a how-to video. This type of video is great for teaching people how to do certain tasks, like installing software, designing websites, to mention some common examples. You can also use video to teach more complex topics like math, history, etc. Using video for education is a great way to mix entertainment with education. This is especially important for kids who are in the age range where they’re learning a lot of new things.

Video is a must have if you wanna stay competitive in the digital age

This goes back to the first reason why video content is a must-have for learning and education websites: it makes your content stand out from the crowd. If you want your website to be at the top of the game and on the path to success, you need to include video content on your site.

The competition is fierce, and if you don’t use every method at your disposal to rise above the rest, you could fall behind. Video content is a great way to gain an edge on your competition and make sure your site stays at the top of the game. It’s the best way to grab your visitors’ attention and keep it. Without engaging content, you risk losing your audience. Video content is a great way to make sure that doesn’t happen.

There are many ways to use video in education and learning

Video content doesn’t always have to be used for education. It’s a great way to teach people about who you are and what your company or website is all about. It’s a great way to let your audience get to know you better and feel like they’re a part of your team. It’s a great way to build trust and encourage people to learn more about your site and what you have to offer. You can also use video as a form of entertainment. You can have a variety show-like video or a funny video on your site. You can also have a video that’s specifically meant to entertain.

Tips from social psychology to create better learning and educational video content

Support the learning process with guiding questions in your videos along the timeline of the video.

Follow the personalization principle: People learn better from multimedia presentations when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. 

Remember cognitive load theory and limited capacity of the receiver to extra information, integration of new information has to be gradual, but using visual channels will help the retention in the long term. 

Look up Germane load if you want to understand this better. In social psychology, Germane load is the portion of the memory devoted to integrating new information, the creation and modification of schema (Sweller, van Merriënboer, & Paas, 1998). Germane load is similar to the memory usage of your computer while it's actually installing your programs. 

Conclusion

The important thing to remember is that video is an outstanding tool to support learning and education whether it be website visitors, novice learners or anyone really you wish to engage. websites make it clear just how important it is. It’s the best way to grab your visitors’ attention and keep it. It’s the best way to make sure your content stands out from the crowd and is easily distinguishable from the rest. It’s the best way to make sure your content is easily accessible to a larger audience. It’s the best way to differentiate yourself from your competition and stay competitive in the digital age.

We’re pleased to announce our biggest rework yet…

Introducing Colossyan 2.0. The newest generation of your favourite video creator.

Colossyan 2.0 isn’t just a new coat of paint. We’ve worked on every part of the machine to provide a faster, more reliable experience for you. Plus we’ve laid everything out so that it just makes more sense. Here’s what you can expect:

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A smoother experience

We’ve given our interface a complete redesign to make it more intuitive for users; a better menu bar with all the options so you don’t have to go searching for anything while you’re in editing mode. You’ll find that everything just flows better too.

Better, faster, stronger

We beefed up our backend to make video creation 200% faster. We wanted to make sure that generating your videos was super quick, so we got straight down to it. Enjoy improved stability so you can focus on what’s important - creating valuable video content to delight your users.

^‍Rock-solid reliability

Expect more from your favourite video creation product. We’ve combed over the bugs and fixed the code to create a more reliable experience with improved stability. Nothing wonky here!

Get a better idea of what you’re creating

We’ve fine-tuned the video creator so you can see your scenes more easily, quickly add transitions, and preview what your video will look like. You’ll also be able to see an estimate of how long your video will be. How helpful!

We’re curious to see what you think of Colossyan 2.0!

Continue creating content with Colossyan now.

Classic rendering techniques can generate photorealistic images for various complex, real-world scenarios when given high-quality scene specifications. 

They also gives us explicit editing capabilities over various elements of a scene like camera viewpoint, lighting, geometry, and materials. But a significant manual effort is required to generate high-quality scene models from images. Automating scene modeling from images is an open research problem.

Deep generative models

Deep generative models have improved quite a lot in recent years, successfully produce high-quality, photorealistic images and videos that are visually compelling. These networks can generate images or videos either from random noise or can be conditioned on certain user inputs like segmentation masks or layouts. However, they have limitations and these techniques do not yet support fine-grained control of the details of the generated scene. They also cannot always handle complex interactions between the scene objects well.

In contrast, neural rendering methods try to use the best of both approaches and enable the controllability, and synthesis of novel, high-quality images or videos. There are different types of neural rendering techniques depending on the:

• Level or type of control they support over the synthetic output 
• Types of input they require 
• Outputs they produce
• Nature of the network or architecture they use

The inputs for a typical neural rendering approach are certain scene conditions like viewpoint, layout, and lighting. A neural scene representation is then built from these inputs. Later, images can be synthesized based on novel scene properties using this representation. This encoded scene representation is not constrained by modeling approximations and can be optimized for new, high-quality images. Neural rendering techniques also incorporate ideas from classical computer graphics like input features, network architectures, and scene representations. This makes the learning task easier and helps increase the controllability of the output.

Neural Rendering

There is a type of Neural Rendering that enables novel-viewpoint synthesis as well as scene-editing in 3D (geometry deformation, removal, copy-move). It is trained for a specific scene or object. Besides ground truth color images, it requires a coarse, reconstructed and tracked 3D mesh including a texture parametrization.

Instead of the classical texture, the approach learns a neural texture, a texture that contains neural feature descriptors per surface point. A classical computer graphics rasterizer is used to sample these neural textures, and given the 3D geometry and viewpoint, resulting in a projection of the neural feature descriptors onto the image plane.

The final output image is generated from the rendered feature descriptors using a small U-Net, which is trained in conjunction with the neural texture. The learned neural feature descriptors and decoder network compensates for the coarseness of the underlying geometry, as well as for tracking errors, while the classical rendering step ensures consistent 3D image formation.

These techniques also find their applications in facial reenactment problems. The human facial texture can be encoded in the form of neural textures. Then, with the help of UV maps, this texture can be sampled. The deep U-NET-type architectures can be used to decode the neural textures. Once the neural texture is decoded, another UNET-like architecture can be employed to paint the synthetic texture on the background image.

Colossyan makes use of such technology to achieve the talking avatar generation. We have developed conditional generative neural networks that help us generate photorealistic videos according to a given audio signal. The whole pipeline involves different steps from processing the speech signal to driving the human face model, to performing neural rendering. All the above-discussed techniques play a very important role in achieving lifelike results.

Also read: AI Video Generation: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Want to make your website even more interactive? We’ve got two apps that make it easy for you. First - Colossyan, the go-to solution for anyone looking for high-quality synthetic video content. And second - VideoAsk, a web app that lets you ask your audience questions and receive answers, face-to-face.

Look how easy it is to set up. Just follow these steps to make your first interactive AI-generated video chatbot. 

How to set up your first video chatbot in just a few simple steps:

What do you need: 

• Colossyan account: With Colossyan create studio-quality videos with AI actors for your chatbot flow. Sign up quickly here.

• VideoAsk account: VideoAsk is a platform for hosting chatbot-style video widgets. here you can create your Video Ask account here. Upload your Colossyan-generated video to VideoAsk.
  

Build a chatbot the human way

Build a voice-driven chatbot with personality, powered by AI technology. Use it for all your conversational workflows. Get face-to-face with your prospects, customers, or audience through asynchronous video.

This way you can:

• Add a personal touch to your website 
• Boost your customers’ experience 
• Engage with your audience
• Get better feedback from clients 
• Answer questions when you’re not there

How to set it up

Let’s start with Colossyan-related set up: 

• First, start planning your video chatbot. You can do this on a piece of paper, or with online application like Miro. Gather the questions and answers you want to use for the video.
• Prepare the video script. You will need about 5-6 separate videos for your chatbot. Try putting together shorter videos as each clip can’t be longer than 30 seconds.
• Start creating your videos in Colossyan Creator. Some tips for best results: because VideoAsk widget shows videos in portrait mode, it’s best to select the 9:16 scene size. To do this pick an actor, go to settings, and choose the right format.  Pick or upload a background image or video, add music and once you’re happy with the final result genareta your video. Then it’s time to work with the flow in VideoAsk. 

A quick guide how to start with Colossyan Creator:

Now set up VideoAsk:

1. Go to VideoAsk and create a new VideoAsk. Select the “Upload a video” option. Now you can upload your video from Colossyan. You can add text and decide which questions to use as options. Multiple choice answers are a good way to go. 
2. Now it’s time to customize your VideoAsk. Give it a name, select the language, choose your colors, the style of the widget and you're ready to share! 

Now you can breathe life into your chatbots with personalized videos and AI actors.

AI is amazing, no doubt about it. But how does one go about implementing AI and actually use it in day to day activities? Are you a content creator for a webshop, an e-commerce business owner or manager at a larger company, or are you just looking to innovate and discover? Look no further, we got you covered!

Colossyan meets Tolstoy! Boom!

Colossyan, the is the go-to solution for everyone looking for high-quality synthetic video content and Tolstoy the one and only interactive video creator tool meets to deliver the interactive video content, easier than you ever thought possible — a match made in synthetic heaven. If a desperate friend asks you, wiping his/her tears: “How can I save money and time creating interactive videos?”  You have the answer, that’s right: Colossyan + Tolstoy. Let us make it easy on you, just follow these steps to make your first interactive AI generate video chatbot:

How to start: 

1. Set up your Tolstoy account: Tolstoy allows you to build personalized, one-on-one interactive conversations on your website, send in email campaigns, inside your SaaS platform, and much more. 
2. Sign up for Colossyan. With Colossyan you can generate synthetic, studio-quality videos with AI actors.

How to use Colossyan Creator?

1. Pick an actor: Choose an actor from our ever-growing international selection. We also offer exclusive actors and face/voice cloning.
2. Write script: Input your script for the actor to read. Our text-to-speech software supports more than 60 languages and accents.
3. Generate video: This is where the magic happens! In just a few minutes, Colossyan generates your video that is ready to watch and share.

Further guidelines follow the guidelines on this video:

How to use Colossyan and Tolstoy together: 

1. First, prepare your videos. Depending on your use case, determine how many videos you’ll want to use. To make the video more dynamic, keep the scripts as short as possible, around 30 seconds each. 

2. Go to Colossyan Creator, and generate your videos. For extra help on best practices, check out Colossyan’s Youtube for tutorials. 

3. Next, head over to Tolstoy and create a new Tolstoy. Then choose “Make my own” and "Upload a video" option. Upload your Colossyan video. You can add overlay text, and decide how people should "answer" the particular step. Click save, and you have your first "step"!

4. Create more steps in Tolstoy until you have created a personalized conversation flow. 

5. Then you're ready to share your Tolstoy. You can embed on your website, as a pop up widget, or in an email campaign. 

6. Track interactions in the Tolstoy dashboard to monitor progress and optimize the journey. 

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Now you are a total pro creating interactive videos

Even if you have never made a video in your life, now you can create a professional and interactive video in just a few minutes. You can use your interactive videos for marketing, sales, or even for training. These platforms offer you a time-saving option to engage with your audience. 

For some years now, it is undeniable that videos, in all their forms, have become quite important in almost every field. They are even more important in online marketing as an advertising tool.

The traditional process of making a video has historically presented many challenges, ranging from tedious filming schedules to long editing timelines. Fortunately, AI video eliminates many of these obstacles.

In this blog, we'll explain how this cost-effective and revolutionary AI video generator technology works.

Choosing the right AI avatar

Many tools use AI avatars as the main on-screen talent used to bring your message to life. By using AI actors, there's no longer a need to rent studios to film footage or hire human actors.

But to use an AI actor effectively, you'll want to make sure that you choose the right avatar to convey your content effectively. Tools like Colossyan offer 150+ different AI actors of all different ages, ethnicities, and professions. This way, you can choose an avatar that successfully represents your audience demographics.

Your AI avatar will essentially be the face of your content – so it's important to choose wisely. Fortunately, tools like Colossyan support the use of multiple avatars in a single scene, giving you a wider choice of avatars. This is especially useful when developing scenario-based training content.

Choosing the setting and languages

The setting of your video is paramount. After all, there's a reason why people spend large sums of money to rent fully equipped studios to shoot video content. However, with an AI video generator, there's no need for studios.

Instead, you can add background images to set your video anywhere you choose. In just a few clicks, your AI avatar can go from a beach scene to a busy cityscape. No need to pick up a camera.

In addition to determining where your video is set, it's also important to decide what languages you want it to be in. Traditionally, you'd need to reshoot your footage for each language variant you needed, but now with AI video, your content can be translated to 100+ languages in just a few clicks. This allows you to localize your content for different audiences all over the world at no extra cost.

Prepare your script and desired effects in the video

Now that the stage is set and the actor is chosen, it's time to get down to the content. What exactly do you want your AI avatars to say?

Most AI-based videos that use avatars rely on text to speech, meaning you'll input a video script, and your avatar will create a narrative voiceover in return. AI script assistant tools, as well as document to video and prompt to video workflows can help make the scriptwriting process more painless.

Colossyan is a great example of a tool with these features. Additionally, Colossyan's video editing interface is extremely user friendly, meaning you can create professional-grade video content with no additional skills or experience.

The ease of use of whichever video generator tool you decide to use is extremely important, as this will make it easier to add additional elements like images and music that can really spruce up your content.

Here's a bit more about Colossyan:

Leveraging an AI video generator can not only save you time and money, but it can also make your content more engaging.

Don't believe us? Come see for yourself and try Colossyan for free.

AI technologies are being harnessed more than ever across a variety of sectors, learning and development is no different.

Using artificial intelligence to synthesise videos is a subject on an exponential curve drawing more and more interest as a multitude of companies and people discover the opportunity to reduce costs and lead time of video production. AI videos are about to revolutionize L&D, eLearning, and video training.

The main reason is that AI successfully addresses deep-rooted struggles and specific challenges around educating and teaching with video, quickly establishing itself as a key tool in eLearning.

We are at the forefront of this, Colossyan is shaping the new the way to training employees and individuals. No company can ignore these developments, and you are at the right place to be one of the first ones using this amazing tech.

The modernization of training methods

The education sector is evolving, artificial intelligence and machine learning is here to stay and make the job of L&D content developers a lot easier. The work of content creators and marketers can be reduced by as much as 80% with this technological revolution and content can be developed much faster.

Colossyan's technology allows users to synthetically generate and produce instructional videos presented by AI/synthetic actors, all through one intuitive platform. Using videos with faces/human presenters enhances the overall learning experience and increases both engagement and retention of information.

The AI software means videos are much easier to produce. No more expensive filming studios, equipment, overhead costs, or actor recruitment. Colossyan Creator has a library of life-like characters and avatars to select from to create content using just a script.

You can choose from:

• A range characters
• Diverse looks and dressing styles
• Various ethnicities
• Different ages and sexes

An educational video for children will have much more impact if it is presented by someone with looks and mannerisms they can relate to.

Secondly, AI allows the adoption of your training videos into multiple languages. From English to Arabic, Colossyan has over 70 languages to choose from for your video. You can get through your message to virtually anyone in the world regardless of the language the speak.

Finally, AI has the power to make videos for teaching purposes easier to understand for individual targets. Artificial intelligence can adapt intonation, accent, enunciation, voice speed, and more depending on where the viewer is from, their prior knowledge, etc. Indeed, the method used by Colossyan offers a unique balance between humans and machines. The videos are presented by actors whose voices and movements are mapped and synthetically recreated. Human actors create a personal connection with the viewer, acting as a bridge that makes artificial intelligence relatable. Training is becoming easier with this modernization of artificial intelligence.

Teaching in a few figures

Studies in the field of training show that on average people understand teachings through video nine times faster than in a written format or presented in person. Indeed, understanding a message is much easier when it appeals to several of our senses.

Watching a video involves both hearing and seeing, which is why it is so effective. It takes about five to ten minutes to produce a video with artificial intelligence. Compared to traditional video production with a studio and actors, AI can reduce video creation times by 90%! AI can save most of your cots and energy to focus on what's important and in addition guarantees you quality content.

Today, thousands of companies are adapting or have already adapted AI training because of its huge advantages, are you ready to be part of the trend?!

Colossyan is a synthetic media company that provides a world-class video-editing platform that uses AI actors to tell your story. These AI avatars allow you to facilitate human connection while also creating large amounts of content at scale.

Colossyan is a powerful tool with many different feature offerings – and more constantly being added. We built our tech stack by leveraging different open source AI solutions, trained with our actors, built into a complete SaaS product.

In this blog, we'll provide a glimpse into the engineering problems and solutions we encounter at Colossyan.

Introduction to AI video generation

AI video generation is a rapidly evolving field that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to create high-quality videos. This cutting-edge technology has a wide range of applications, from training videos to social media content creation and more.

By automating the video creation process, an AI video generator allows you to create more engaging content more quickly and cost effectively than traditional videos. With an AI avatar as your video host, you won't have to hire human actors, spend hours filming them, and even more time editing all of your footage together. Instead, you can skip the lengthy and manual video creation process with a text-to-speech AI actors, allowing you to create content in minutes instead of weeks.

This technology not only streamlines the video production process, but also opens up opportunities for creative storytelling and interactive content that wouldn't be possible with a traditional video.

What are AI actors?

Before we jump to the full stack, let's talk about the heart of our product: the AI actors.

Different AI models such as our actors require compute power to run. Usually these models compromise on either quality and speed: the better the quality of the actor, the longer a user has to wait for it to be generated. Also, the underlying compute resources can vary a lot based on what the chosen (cloud) provider can offer.

As GPUs are also quite expensive in the cloud, we have to own a flexible setup: autoscaling of instances using GPUs is a must for any company running AI models at scale in production.

We use AWS, and we run G4 EC2 instances that have GPUs in it. For automatic scaling we leverage AWS ECS, and taking it one step further we benefit from AWS Batch for batch processing the work. We did not immediately start off with stream based processing as GPU-based instance scaling is still a bottleneck most of the time. However as our models and other parts of the stack are being improved, we get closer and closer to achieving real-time actor synthetisation.

Colossyan currently offers a diverse range of more than 150 AI avatars to choose from on our platform. These AI actors are ready to be used in your videos, so you're able to select whichever actor best represents your audience or message.

Or, you can create an AI avatar of yourself using our new instant avatar feature. Instant avatars can be created instantly using just seconds of footage.

The AI technology stack

Besides all the actor AI models, there are plenty of well-known industry-standard components that we build our stack upon. From the top to the bottom, our React UI kit was brought to the customers at a very fast pace – just check out our changelog powered by Canny. There's usually a major UI update every 2 weeks. 

Our web backend and API is bundled in a NodeJS container, orchestrated in Kubernetes. Kubernetes comes with a lot of features to ship our product easily (like rolling upgrades), and also many auxiliary services help us in our everyday work: Prometheus for monitoring, Nginx for ingress, logging, etc.

Our product metrics related analytics platform is Mixpanel, providing us with a lot of insights. We pay significant attention to the numbers and raise the bar higher and higher every week. We are actively monitoring many product-related metrics and detecting any anomalies that occur.

Our infrastructure has just recently been put to the test: our Hide the pain Harold prank video campaign. We peaked at several thousand of videos generated in a single day, without major interruption or more than 15 minutes queueing time, but that story will be told in a future blog post.

The future of our AI tech stack

We’ll actively work on creating proper SLAs in the future, by the time we reach product maturity we have to get ready to provide an excellent service to our customers. Failed video generation or major UI flaws all fall into this category.

There are also plenty of new features in our roadmap. From an engineering perspective they differ in complexity, we will uncover them in later blog posts.

What's next?

Want to know how AI models are assembled? How were we able to improve the scalability and robustness of the system? Stay tuned, and follow our channel to get notified about our upcoming blog posts that will dive deep into many more engineering topics!

Interested in seeing Colossyan in action? Try the platform for free here.

‍About Higher Ed Partners UK

Higher Ed Partners Limited helps universities in Europe, Middle East and North Africa expand access to their high-quality degrees and short learning programmes through the online delivery of instruction. They help institutions sustainably grow their online enrolment and revenue at scale.

HEP is part of a global family of dynamic and market-leading online programme management organizations, collectively partnering with more than 100 academic institutions on four continents and helping hundreds of thousands of students worldwide attain their educational goals.

The Challenge

HEP’s mission is to improve the lives of people, in the UK and across the EMENA region by providing access to affordably priced online education of an exceptional standard that can be studied from anywhere and at any time completely removing the traditional barriers to studying.

The HEP Academic Services team supports university’s academic staff and instructional design teams with evidence-based best practices in online teaching and learning, guidance around strategic programme planning, and ongoing professional development and training opportunities.

Based upon needs analysis and in collaboration with programme leaders, the team guides online programme design and planning, assists in module mapping and development, module delivery, quality reviews, and utilization and deployment of learning tools and technologies, all with the clear aim of ensuring the best possible student experience and student outcomes.

HEP’s approach is entirely tailored to the needs of each partner and is built around the principle of scalability. It is further focused on capacity building, equipping the academic teams at the university with the knowledge, tools and resources to help them design and deliver successful online programmes in a virtual learning environment. 

A key component of the online learning programmes developed by HEP is video content. Production of high-quality presentation videos, however, is pricey. It requires significant time and effort to design, produce and edit such content. 

The Solution

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With the help of Colossyan, Jeremy Boucher, Director of Academic Services at HEP, managed to scale the company’s video production and provide access to high-quality presentation videos.  Using Colossyan Creator saves a huge amount of time in preparation and post-production of video content. With the adoption of this new way of content creation process, HEP saves on massive production costs, while maintaining the high-quality of content thanks to Colossyan.

Jeremy notes:

“I have found the Colossyan team to be extremely responsive and helpful, and appreciate their engagement with customers through various channels. I am very impressed with their product focus and their innovation. They are a dynamic and rapidly developing company. The online studio is simple to engage with and use, and the outputs are high quality and impactful.”

Summary

By the use of Colossyan, Higher Ed Partners managed to scale the production of high quality presentation videos to support their clients from all over the world. They use videos generated with Colossyan Creator to support more than 100 academic institutions on four continents and help hundreds of thousands of students worldwide attain their educational goals.