College Board Advanced Placement: AP Classroom
Roles: Producer, Art Director, Instructional Designer
In fall 2019, I joined College Board to create a new in-house video production team under the Advanced Placement (AP) program. AP provides 38 courses to over 1M high school students preparing for higher education worldwide. Many entrepreneurs and high school teachers were creating AP video content and connecting with students on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, but the AP program did not offer its own instructional videos. Our goal was to create instructional resources directly aligned with AP courses’ learning objectives and offer them for free to students.
Applying the SAM (Successive Approximation Model), I gathered information from internal stakeholders and AP course experts to define our learning objectives. I also reviewed competitor offerings and media trends that were popular with GenZ audiences outside of the genres of test prep and education.
Our team entered an iterative design phase and created prototypes in 4 of AP’s most popular courses. In this iterative phase, our goals were to 1) discover a repeatable production process for creating instructional videos, 2) decide on a multimedia format that inspired effective learning outcomes for AP students, and 3) satisfy our program’s time and budget for creating videos at scale.
AP courses require students to acquire content knowledge and practice higher level critical thinking skills. Our team approached the content portion of the curriculum by presenting lectures in the form of animated explainer videos. Here is a sample video from our AP Biology module covering the subject of keystone species and the skill of argumentation in essay writing.
For our US History lessons, we sourced historical images and worked with our in-house legal team to clear copyrights. We embellished photographs with animation to highlight instructional points and make the videos more engaging for our high school audience. Here is a sample from our US History lesson:
I designed prototypes for a multimedia experience that included interactive lessons. In these lessons, students practiced critical thinking skills that would be covered on the exams and included formative assessments that would be captured in our LMS. Here is a sample lesson from our US History module:
Knowing that AP would need to create video at scale for 38 courses, we experimented with different modes of production for our AP prototypes. The previous examples on this page were recorded in a professional studio, and these next two examples were recorded at home using a podcast-style set up—a more cost-effective method.
Ultimately, my team created prototype lessons with over 5 hours of content. These prototypes provided executives with an understanding of the video production process and tiered options for creating instructional products. This iterative design phase laid the foundation for video programs that were scaled across all 38 AP Courses.