We talked with Bryan Polivak, divisional vice president and chief learning officer for Laureate Online, to get a sense about how video for DVDs is produced for Walden University's MS Degree in Nursing program. Polivka has been a distance educator for more than 20 years. He is responsible for learning architecture and technologies used in e-learning platforms, and he has created tens of thousands of hours of distance education during his career.

EdPath: Why did you chose to provide the relatively expensive-to-produce DVD-formatted delivery in the Walden nursing program instead of streaming media?

Polivak: We did not use streaming media because of the research and the surveys we’ve conducted about what nurses prefer and what they are capable of getting. Not a large percentage of them prefer, or are capable of using, streaming media. So we use the DVD because of the high quality and the ease; everybody has access to a DVD player.

Walden has a history of creating and delivering products that are enhanced significantly by video elements. So nursing is not the first place where we have done this. The primary view that we have here is that we can bring to our students the most current information, best practices and best expertise from high-profile faculty and other experts that in a standard face-to-face classroom they would never be able to have. So we develop these products that accompany the online courses specifically for this online audience. And they have the sense and they understand that it was designed precisely for them. It gives us the ability to create for our students an experience that is, we believe, the best education that they could get in nursing.

EdPath: How is the content of these DVDs developed?

Polivak: It’s complex, but basically what we do is put together a high-level team of people to look at the program; that is the first step. That team includes the academics, the content expertise, and a product developer from my staff who has deep experience in developing programs online and using this kind of a media approach. There are other people involved at this level who bring in various experts. They do the research, and they start making plans on how the courses should lay out and who the people are in the field that would be most suitable for various different points in the courses. They actually lay out the whole program course by course at a pretty significant level of detail before they plug in the experts best suited to the kind of demonstrations of techniques, for example, that will be included. So there’s a very significant up-front development process. You have to plan it all out first. From there, we establish course development teams. A course development team has designers and a writer and a lead faculty. We’ll put together a schedule for how we will build these products. So, there are story boards, etc.

And all these things support the online classroom. The majority of the interaction, the way the course works, the discussions that happen between students and students and students and faculty, the quizzes, papers, tests, grades, all that happens within the online platform, and the media is a supplement to that. Everything has to work together to create one whole, unified experience for our students.

I think our expertise in product development is in bringing together the project management, the budget management, the ability to go forward. We, obviously, aren’t the ones who sit there and say, ‘Oh, here’s a good nursing expert.’ However, when those collaborative teams come up with the names of the people, then we have the expertise to go find them, contract them, bring them in, videotape them, and then, of course, bring that into the final product.

EdPath: Where does all this videotaping typically occur?

Polivak: Various places. We have our own video crews, and we contract with video crews. It depends on the circumstances. My department does production for multiple schools, not just nursing, so we have a fairly significant operation going on, making sure we’re making the best use of time, talent and money. But we will sometimes bring contributing scholars into a single location all at once and be able to maximize everybody’s time and energies. Sometimes we will go out to conferences. Sometimes we’ll go out to people’s place of business, or, occasionally, even to their homes. We’ll meet people in airports. Last summer we booked studios at Walt Disney World for about a month, and we brought in nursing contributing scholars for anywhere from a half day to a couple of days. They were involved in panel discussions and interviews. It gave them the opportunity to meet one another, as well as to meet us, and to take a little side trip into Walt Disney World if they were interested. It worked out really well. We got a bunch of people there, and Disney obviously has top-notch facilities for production.

EdPath: Can you explain the process for videotaping sessions that are conducted outside of studios?

Polivak: We have a media development group, a functional area, that is staffed with people who have tremendous experience in video production and have done it in a number of environments. They are familiar with all of the processes necessary to gain permission to shoot, to get releases and waivers, to set up schedules. They understand the protocols within hospitals. Care has to be taken, so you’re not compromising anyone’s privacy. If anyone is put on tape, on video, we need a release from them before we can use that footage.

In a hospital, we typically will not do significant set ups where you would, for instance, have two or three cameras and where you would light things really well. Instead, we’ll go into a room, put up maybe a couple of lights to make sure what’s on tape is visible and watchable, and then bring in one camera and shoot off the shoulder. This allows the camera person to move around and get the appropriate shots. And we do very little scripting of anything. About the only things that are scripted are maybe some interstitial materials in the final product where there’s a voice over that sets something up or does transitions. We use very few actors. When we do, they’re typically playing the role of patients or consumers or people who they are actually in real life. And all of the experts, the nurses, the doctors, the nursing administrators, they are who they are, doing what they do.

EdPath: Any final comments?

Polivak: I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that we get caught up in all of this flashy production, because the main thing that we never lose sight of is that what we’re doing is bringing to our students the best quality education we can. All of these elements are carefully, and with a high level of discipline, made to serve the students and their experience. I learned a long, long time ago that production quality and bells and whistles and flashy things do absolutely nothing to further the learning. If the learning is of high quality, then the nice flourishes are typically highly appreciated, and we want to put them in there because they are the state of the art. But I’ve seen too many efforts go awry where people get caught up in these production values. They go Hollywood, and we do not go Hollywood. We are about learning.