2024 Wrapped: Visible Body Edition

We wrapped up 2024 with 250 new academic institutions joining the Visible Body community—over 100 new colleges and universities plus 150 new high schools, districts, and career and technology programs! Well over 1,000 institutions use Visible Body to enhance the learning experience. 

As a small company with big goals, we rely heavily on customer feedback to offer the continual software upgrades that wow our customers. Every day, we think about what we can offer our instructors and students to improve teaching and learning. 

The team looks at a lot of data, considers all customer feedback, and constantly adds more features and refinements. 

Let’s take a look back at 2024 and share what features our customers used most, what they asked for, what we added, and what we have in mind for 2025. We are so very proud of the growing VB community, and we hope this community information makes you proud to be a member too.

The Visible Body community by the numbers

How big is the VB community? Bigger every year!

In 2024…

• 70,000 students, instructors, and professionals subscribed to Visible Body Suite, Visible Body’s huge database of visual assets. VB Suite includes features for reference and student engagement like augmented reality, virtual dissections, and interactive flashcards.
• 100,000+ students took a Courseware course this year. Courseware offers instructors the ability to leverage VB Suite’s database and feature set to create engaging, effective assignments and assessments.
• 67,000+ users in 98 countries around the globe downloaded our Human Anatomy Atlas mobile app, which is available in 7 languages. HAA offers a core part of our visual asset database and a subset of our features in a pocket guide on your mobile device.
• Instructors assigned over 65,000 assessments that students took over 1,760,000 times! Students report that learning with Courseware really helps master concepts.

We want to thank each of you for entrusting us with your healthcare and life science reference and educational goals!

The year's most-used Visible Body features

We gather anonymous analytics on the buttons customers most frequently press and the time they spend in the different areas of the software. This data helps us figure out future development needs—if customers use certain features a lot, we prioritize making them even better, and for features that are less popular, we consider how they could become more useful.

New assignments in Courseware have made a splash!

So what features did community members use most in VB software? 

• Just this fall semester, customers used our VB Suite 3D model dissections over 3 million times and viewed Flashcards over a million times. That’s lots of virtual learning!
• On average, customers spent 25 minutes using VB Suite every time they opened it and searched for specific content over 3 million times. Our 20,000+ visual asset database has robust search features to serve up what you need!
• Over 50% of Courseware customers are already using the new LMS integrations that became available in 2024! 
• Almost 10% of Courseware customers have incorporated the all-new step-by-step assignments into their courses. Developing the new assignments feature was a mighty effort, and we are so happy to see customers find it immediately helpful!
  
  

New features: you requested, we released

When we say we’re a customer-led company, we mean it! Every day, our product teams get customer requests through the sales and support teams. We take customer requests seriously. As one customer wrote, “I appreciated your company's acceptance to feedback. Great job. Even if you don't make changes, you were willing to receive my idea. I reached out to 2 other companies for the same request, and they sent me back their usage policy. I appreciate your company accepts feedback and creates an environment where your employees are encouraged to receive information and consider ideas.”

We consider every idea and critique customers send us. Here are some examples of customer ideas from the past year:

• “D2L integration please”
• “Ability to dissect the ear model”
• “Different color highlight options please”
• “We need more reproductive system content and details”
• “I want students to be able to re-open expired assignments”
• “I am a podiatrist and nails cause more than 80% of the reason for consultations…. It would be incredible to have illustrations of the nail system.”
• “It would be great if we could 'save view' on an illustration so that the illustration can be added to a 'Tour' [just like a 3D model can]. Also, it would be helpful if there was some way to organize my 'favorites.' As I save favorites to create tours, the page gets a little busy.”

Many of these examples are on the list for future development and release! Every bit of customer feedback helps us understand what you need that we can provide. Feedback goes straight to the product teams, and you can always send your thoughts and critiques to us through your VB team representative or to support@visiblebody.com. We love keeping the conversation going and adding to our products.

Many customers asked for fetal development content, and we listened!

We listen to your critiques and requests; we also love your accolades. They make our day! Here are a couple kind comments we’ve received from customers:

• “The problem was fixed very quickly. I was very impressed especially considering that I submitted my problem on a Saturday."
• “[Visible Body is] the best Anatomy & Physiology Atlas I have ever used. I will always recommend this to fellow students and teachers…. Very clear, concise with great picture quality and easy to identify body parts. Thanks Visible Buddies!”
• ”This program is awesome. I have used other anatomy apps before and I find Visible Body to be extremely helpful for I am in a chiropractic doctorate program and anatomy can be difficult when taught without cadavers. This has helped tremendously.“
  
  

Visible Body released 35 software and content upgrades in 2024

In addition to usage data and customer feedback, we also spend a lot of time researching best practices for edtech security, scalability, and privacy—and listening to what key software and hardware companies are releasing! All the data we collect and the feedback we receive is carefully considered and prioritized. We continually release updates to our community of customers.

New assignments keep students focused on learning objectives.

What new content and features did customers get from Visible Body this year?

• New assignments that create an “on the rails,” distraction-free online environment where students can move seamlessly through activities.
• Reproductive, endocrine, and embryology models and visuals. We got a lot of requests for this content from CTE and nursing programs, and we listened!
• Assignments and assessments aligned with state and national standards—our Courseware course database includes even more  premade assignments.
• Self-guided A&P bootcamp inside VB Suite. So many students benefit from self study and more practice that we included a version in Courseware, too!
• Many customers wanted expanded accessibility features, so we added keyboard controls, voiceover, and talkback features in VB Suite and an accessible version of the default Courseware A&P Course. 
• Refined and added functionalities for Flashcards and Tours, which are some of our most popular features.
• Our LMS integrations for Visible Body Courseware got a huge upgrade to LTI 1.3, complete with gradebook sync, deep assignment linking, and single sign-on, and an expansion to include Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle and Schoology.
• We added many SOC 2 upgrades to our privacy, security, and reliability.

That’s just a few key highlights—Visible Body released 35 different updates this year! You can read about others and stay on top of new releases for VB Suite and Courseware on our support site. 

We met you in person!

Visible Body team members packed up their Chromebooks, PCs, Macbooks, large touchscreens, and small mobile devices and traveled around the states (and a few times overseas) to meet customers and educators looking for software that addresses their business needs. We demoed VB Suite and Courseware, showing off augmented reality lab assignments, virtual dissections on tables, and Courseware's bite-sized lessons that keep students learning. 

In 2024, we covered:

• 65 conferences
• 25 states
• 3 countries

Wowing the crowd at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany this fall.

Thank you to each and every one of the thousands of educators who came to our booths. Our in-person discussions on how software like Visible Body can engage students and expedite learning contribute heavily to our product design!

What’s next in 2025?

Based on our community feedback, best practices, and data analytics, we‘ve got some great updates planned! Stay on the lookout for:

• Anatomical diversity! This series of visual assets shows typical anatomy alongside common or clinically significant variations.
• More standards-based curriculum content. Visible Body’s premade lab manuals, interactive assignments, and assessments are used in classrooms around the world, and more standards-based premade curriculum content will make it even easier for instructors to use Visible Body.
• Our first artificial intelligence release will make it faster to get the 3D views you want!
• Rostering and templated/blueprint courses for all of our LMS and curriculum development customers. These features will help administrators roll out amazing Courseware courses to even more students! 
• Additional physiology interactivities!

That’s just a snapshot of the new content and features we plan to build for the community in 2025! We grew almost 20% in 2024, and we are busy doing what we do every day: building tools that help our community of students, instructors, and practitioners to make teaching and learning more efficient and fun.

Cheers to the new year!

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Are you an instructor? We have award-winning 3D products and resources for your anatomy and physiology course! Learn more here.