Avatar Briefings: Can AI Videos Reduce Anxiety and Boost Attendance?

There is an increasing sense of anxiety among undergraduate students in higher education when attending sessions, fuelled by academic pressure, social expectations, and fear of failure (Rastogi et al., 2025). This is particularly heightened when the sessions are challenging, as there is an associated fear of failure, or of being seen to fail at the specified questions, tasks or understanding (Rawle et al., 2025). In addition to the standard resources posted in advance of a session, the authors sought to leverage AI to generate a short briefing video to assess its influence on student attendance compared with the previous couple of years (Hai et al., 2026; Trung, 2025). Co-pilot was used to create a script for a briefing document from the session's resources, with a video of approximately 90 seconds for each of the two sessions. Synthesia then created a video from the script with a human avatar. Each video was reviewed for clarity and accuracy. Two videos with identical content were created for each session: one with a female avatar and the other with a male avatar, to enable students to make preferential selections (Pellas, 2023). The proposed session will demonstrate the workflow and the ease of video production, explore its impact on students, and explore its potential for application in other areas.