National University's Project Access is helping students succeed with the help of peer-to-peer guidance videos created using Kapwing. The project is part of a five-year $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education focused on Hispanic students, but their videos are beneficial to the student population as a whole.

The team at Project Access found that creating a sense of community was challenging because the university is primarily remote and many students have full-time jobs and are online at different hours. To address this, they created guidance videos that can be viewed at any time. According to Jackie Quezada, Associate Project Director for the grant, the team "saw a need for students to have some sort of guidance and that guidance we found is easier when it's peer-to-peer".

Needing Flexible Video Editing Workflows

Initially, the team used CapCut for video editing, but they found it was not user-friendly or collaborative enough. "We were looking for something to where the students that create their own videos can also edit their own videos and it was also like a collaborative sort of environment," said Jackie.

After searching for a user-friendly editing software, they found Kapwing. They tested it and it "just made sense for our team". The team found that CapCut had too many features that were overwhelming and confusing, making it difficult to train new student editors. Elizabeth Villagomez, a student who works on editing and recording videos, noted that with Kapwing, "the best way to learn how to edit is just playing around with it. And thankfully, Kapwing is so straightforward. It literally tells you what it is."

COM 100 Before Class Begins Sample Project made on Kapwing:

The Impact of User-Friendly Software

Kapwing's collaborative features were also a major draw for the team. "CapCut just wasn't as collaborative and then when we found Kapwing it just made more sense for what we needed," Jackie explained. The team uses Kapwing to make videos in English and Spanish for each course, with the students who completed the course creating videos for future students of the same course. The videos include tips for how to navigate the online course and how to prepare for assignments. Each set of videos consists of five videos in English and five in Spanish.

The video creation process has evolved, with the team constantly trying new things to see what works best. The team starts with an intro and outro template. Then they use the split tool, stickers, and B-roll. More recently they've been using the recording feature in Kapwing as well as the clean audio tool to remove background noise.

Since using Kapwing, the team has seen significant productivity improvements, with the ability to turn out videos faster. The collaborative nature of the platform "overall made it easier to [jump in and finish projects that others have started] a lot quicker." said Jackie. 

While the team does not have specific numbers on improvements since switching to Kapwing, they have produced approximately 65 videos that have been fully reviewed by faculty, and another 120 that are currently being edited. There are also approximately 350 videos that need editing.

Kapwing: A Video Editor That Works

Per Elizabeth, "the quality of the content that we export is also really good... the video quality just is drastically better with Kapwing." Project Access's success with Kapwing demonstrates the value of using a user-friendly and collaborative video editing platform in higher education. The team believes that the key benefits of Kapwing are its collaborative nature and its user-friendly interface, along with the wide variety of editing tools available.

Both Jackie and Elizabeth also mentioned their appreciation for Kapwing's customer service compared to other service providers. Kapwing has helped them learn the best ways to use Kapwing and always offers a quick response time. Jackie would "recommend Kapwing, especially in the higher ed space" for those in need of a creative, video editing tool.

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