About AHS
American Heritage School is a distinguished private school serving grades K–12 located in American Fork, Utah, United States. It is an accredited member of the Northwest Association of Independent Schools (NWAIS) and Cognia.
AHS serves approximately 1,000 students in grades K-12 on campus with approximately 5,000 students participating in distance education and homeschool courses offered by American Heritage Worldwide, the school's distance education program.
As an independent K-12 school, American Heritage School shines a steady beacon of hope in education amid the vacillating world of secularism and humanism. In both physical and virtual classrooms, the school offers a unique, proven, and expanding program founded on faith, freedom, and family.
Challenges
AHS worldwide supports education in various formats - the main formats being parent-led and student-led courses.
Their Family School courses (parent-led) provide ready-made lessons for parents to use to teach multiple children of various ages together in subjects like history, geography, science, literature, art, and music.
Their LiftEd courses (student-led) provide access to recorded teacher video instruction and access to a group of students that students connect with throughout the learning experiences. Here, students view a video lesson together and respond to the questions asked in the video lesson by recording their answers as videos and submitting them. These videos are then viewed by other students of the group to view.
Given the consumption of videos by both parents and students on phones or laptops, the main challenge for AHS was to encode and host such a large of quantity of videos on a regular basis and deliver them to students across the globe, in good quality.
Additionally, with free video encoding, AHS Worldwide was also able to save costs and only had to pay for hosting and delivery. This meant that such a large number of videos did not impact came at an affordable cost, without burning a hole in their pocket.
Solution
AHS Worldwide created an extensive library of on-demand educational videos accessible to both students and parents across K-12 levels using api.video. These videos were of various lengths and served different purposes.
For instance,
- Slightly longer (10-12 minutes) videos were meant to educate on a certain topic
- Short, pre-recorded videos assigned tasks to students for them work on it together
- Short, bite-sized videos assigning topics to students to think and write about. The videos were a mix of self-recorded and animated ones.
In these educational videos, students and parents had the flexibility to tailor their learning experience. They could easily adjust the video speed to suit their pace, rewind key segments for better understanding, and conveniently download the content for future reference. This user-friendly approach helped learners of different ages to ensure an effective study experience.
AHS also used api.video to store internal trainings, meeting recordings and conversations within their organization. These were helpful to ensure seamless communication within their network. Additionally, they put api.video’s Media Recorder to use to upload videos from the users’ webcams.
Using api.video Member add-on, AHS was also easily able to allow their network of educators to contribute in a common workspace.
They also leveraged api.video’s strong Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver these videos to students and parents in the US and across the globe (verify this info).
Impact
With students submitting assignments in video durations ranging from 15 seconds to 1 hour, AHS Worldwide successfully maintained a steady flow of content on their platform. They have 150,000+ videos in their kitty and have significantly influenced the education sector, easing the lives of parents and students alike. Today AHS Worldwide serves tens of thousands of children in over 100 countries, globally.
Conclusion
Today, AHS continues to piggyback on api.video’s API to bring a change in the way we access education. Be it homeschooling, online tuitions or in-campus learning, we are sure that videos will always make transfer of knowledge easier, and we’re glad that we can contribute in it in a small way.