Producing Rich-media Content for Online Education

Full Sail University, based in Winter Park, Fla., has been known for its cutting-edge technology and immersive campus environment for the past 30 years. When thinking about taking its education to a new realm, online, the university faced a massive undertaking unlike any other it had experienced before. Wanting to keep the campus feel with forward technology and trends, the team had to think in a completely new way, which meant not accepting any standard that had been set previously by other universities for online programs.

After examining other learning management systems and platforms, the team determined they were not as intuitive and aesthetically representative of Full Sail University standards. This meant that the first order of business was to hire a team of programmers to develop a custom learning content management system (LCMS) for the school. After two years of development and beta testing, Full Sail Online (FSO) was born.

Another element of taking Full Sail to the online world was to ensure that students had professional, media-rich components to view and to examine. Keeping the student experience in mind, Full Sail hired a group of designers, videographers, and filmmakers that would be called the Online Production Team. This team's central goal is to create media pieces for each course going online. The pieces could be illustrations, video lessons for specific topics, interviews, or technical video explanations. On average, each course has 10 to 12 media-rich pieces to illustrate high-level concepts and topics.

The educator works alongside the Online Production Team throughout the entire creation process. In the preproduction phase, the instructor storyboards out the learning objectives of the media element and meets with the production team to determine what visuals would best convey the message they are trying to deliver. Once the storyboard and script are complete, the next step is for the production team to scout out a location to shoot the video and, for mixed media, begin the illustration and/or animation process. This team has done several on-location shoots at schools, design firms, and entertainment studios as well as using the campus' own HD sound stages and sets. Once the raw footage is captured in HD using Sony HVR-Z1Us, the team starts the editing process with such tools as Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. The end result of this labor-intensive process is original HD content that speaks to students about their particular course of study. The content is encoded in H.264 QuickTime (.mov) and Flash Video (.flv) and uploaded to Full Sail's proprietary LCMS. This content is viewed on each student's very own MacBook Pro (issued by Full Sail), which is fully equipped with all of the software necessary for students to become the innovators and creators.

One of the first degrees to go online was Education Media Design & Technology, headed by Dr. Holly Ludgate. Aside from this being the first 12-month Master's degree fully online, this was also a new demographic that Full Sail was breaking into: educators and trainers. Before this program could get off of the ground, the challenge was to translate all of the amazing hands-on, real-world experiences happening on campus to an online environment. As the program director, carrying out this vision to drive the curriculum and delivery was at the forefront of Ludgate's mind. The foundation of this program is centered on meeting the needs of all learners and intelligences. Secondly, digital storytelling is an important component woven throughout the entire 12 months, giving the students a voice through media. Therefore, having a project-based curriculum, omitting tests, and truly asking students to expand their creativity with media made the most sense to reach the learner.

Having the online production team develop media that demonstrates the concepts the students are learning in Education Media Design & Technology has been a pivotal piece in the success of the program. Viewing a year's worth of high-production quality media gives students a foundation of what instructionally sound content looks like from a creative perspective. When students graduate from this degree, they are now the digital storytellers through film, games, and other types of immersive media.

For more information about Full Sail, please visit www.fullsail.edu.