As higher education institutions transition into the AI age, campuses are looking to revolutionize education across multiple disciplines. They aim to empower students and faculty by equipping them with digital fluency, an essential skill in today’s workplace.
The Adobe Education Executive Roundtable series, Creativity and AI: Unlocking Student Success and Preparing Students for the Future, features in-person roundtable events with higher education leaders to discuss the importance of digital fluency and the profound implications generative AI has on post-secondary education and society.
Below is a recap of our recent event in Fort Lauderdale hosted on February 13, 2024, at Margaritaville Beach Resort.
Students told us that the digital tools made them feel like they were going to be able to stand out when they were presenting themselves in the future — for grad school, for employment, for leadership positions on campus.” — Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski, Weber State University
Key takeaways from the event
In describing the unique digital transformation journeys at their schools, the roundtable speakers touched on a number of common themes:
- AI presents incredible opportunities to enhance teaching and learning, but institutions need to take a thoughtful and strategic approach in order to integrate it responsibly and effectively.
- Creativity is becoming even more essential as a way for students to differentiate themselves in their coursework and careers.
- Institutions can ensure equity by making creative and generative AI tools accessible to all students, and by inspiring faculty to incorporate digital literacy into courses across the curriculum.
- Digital transformation initiatives work best when the administration, IT, and faculty work in partnership to ensure that new technologies support the core curriculum and desired student outcomes. Institutions can leverage ideas and best practices from other institutions as part of the Adobe Creative Campus program.
Setting the stage
The event featured a panel of speakers including academic leaders who covered the following topics:
- Digital fluency and access: best practices to ensure that all students have ethical and equal access to the generative AI creativity tools they need in today's digital-first world.
- Student engagement: how authentic assessment, digital storytelling, and generative AI can foster engagement, connecting faculty and students regardless of location, time, or device.
- Bridging education and industry: role of higher education in building a robust bridge to the professional world — all based on the skills students' future employers are actively seeking.
Opening remarks on creativity and generative AI
Todd Taylor, Adobe Pedagogical Evangelist and English Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, kicked off the event by reviewing key challenges in higher education over the past six years, from a steep drop in student engagement to lagging digital literacy in both faculty and students, particularly in this new age of generative AI.
He acknowledged good news as well, noting that enrollment is on the rise again, perceptions of online learning have improved, and faculty and administrators can innovate and succeed if they negotiate these changes and collaborate on solutions together.
Attendees said that, at the moment, their campus communities are feeling everything from disdain to curiosity. Some are “hungry for AI” and “active” in the discovery phase, while others are feeling more cautious. Long term, they hope to be everything from “strategic” to “immersed and intentional” to “engaged without fear.” And one participant acknowledged that “these tools are not perfect,” so schools need to ensure that students benefit from their use.
Generative AI and Higher Education: Promise, Pitfalls, and Futures Yet Unwritten
The first speaker, Matt Acevedo, began by acknowledging key questions the University of Miami is grappling with when it comes to integrating AI on campus. As Executive Director of Learning Innovation and Faculty Engagement, Acevedo said he and his team are trying to determine how AI can enhance teaching, learning, research, and administration; how to mitigate AI bias and harm; and how to manage AI costs and logistics.
He described what he called a “continuum of AI-informed teaching.” On one side, faculty are restricting or penalizing the use of AI. In the middle, faculty are creating learning experiences in which AI systems aren’t useful, like hands-on, discussion-based, or role-playing activities.
On the other side of the continuum, however, faculty are using teaching strategies that intentionally and meaningfully incorporate AI. They’re creating experiences that involve:
- Learning about AI. Acevedo said educators need to promote AI literacy so that students understand the landmines and biases.
- Learning with AI. Faculty are doing everything from using chatbots to help students create elevator pitches for their resumes to having students use Adobe Firefly to develop imagery for public awareness campaigns.
- Learning from AI. In one example, UM faculty are developing a chatbot to tutor students in Italian. In Acevdeo’s own course on designing workplace training, he created chatbots to act as subject matter experts that students can interact with to gain industry-specific knowledge.
Ultimately, Acevedo said that higher education leaders need to resist the “AI-ification” of everything” so they don’t go down a path that privileges tools over processes, technology over technique, and systems over people.
Transformation, Technology, and Pedagogy: Closing the Digital Gap in Higher Education
Next, Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski shared Weber State University’s journey of transformation around digital fluency. The Vice Provost for High-impact Educational Experiences, Faculty Excellence, and International and Graduate Programs described WSU as a regional institution that accepts everyone who applies, and that has a mandate creating workforce-ready graduates.
In 2016, she said, WSU began using Adobe Creative Cloud in 12 first-year composition courses in which students would script and produce documentary films. Faculty soon found that students in these courses outperformed students in traditional comp courses. “They told us that they were more creative and more able to take risks in their education,” Kowalewski said. “They told us that learning those technologies became a great asset for not only their education, but for their career.”
In 2021, WSU became an Adobe Creative Campus, providing everyone with access to Creative Cloud. Kowalewski said she and her team believe that student success only happens when faculty are successful, so they created a Digital Fluency Council and began transforming the campus and curriculum by:
- Creating a Digital District, a space where instructional designers help faculty retool their course materials to incorporate digital technologies
- Embedding Adobe tools into general ed, major, and capstone courses
- Creating stackable digital fluency credentials for adult learners
- Establishing a task force to address and innovate around the use of AI
- Setting up a faculty grant program to encourage new ideas for teaching and learning with emerging technologies
Because WSU has supported digital fluency “from the top down,” Kowalewski said that when disruptive technologies like AI arrive, everyone is open to thinking and talking about them, and they’re better able to adapt and respond.
Experiential Learning and Emerging Technologies Across the Curriculum
Andrew Ilnicki, Director of Experiential Education and Emerging Technologies at the University of Richmond, closed out the university presentations by describing how he’s worked to infuse creativity and new technologies into courses at Virginia Commonwealth University and now at UR.
A hub for innovation, the da Vinci Center has spearheaded efforts for VCU to become LEGO Serious Play -certified and an Adobe Creative Campus. He said that the center’s work is academic, experiential, and experimental, so that if something new like AI is coming down the pike, leaders can partner with companies like Adobe to make the most of it. “The goal of everybody is to fix school, to make it as good as it can possibly be,” he said.
To learn Adobe’s creative tools, interested faculty and students can take a one-credit course in which they create and touch up headshots for LinkedIn, design public service announcement websites, and design and prototype mobile apps to address pain points around the university. Students are now using Creative Cloud in a variety of ways across disciplines, with projects including:
- Designing and prototyping retail products and their packaging, including a trail mix that now sells at Whole Foods
- Creating a financial literacy education app for Capital One customer service agents
- Redesigning the mobile app for VCU itself
As for generative AI, Ilnicki showcased the work of a student who used Adobe Firefly to create a sticker campaign about food insecurity. He noted that the student was a scientist, not a designer or an illustrator, which drove home the point that generative AI can empower anyone to create with impact.
These are productivity tools at a minimum, and I think there’s incredible value to this, and Adobe is one of the companies that is trying to do it in the right way." — Andrew Ilnicki, University of Richmond
Student perspectives on digital storytelling and generative AI
The event concluded with a presentation from Keshawna Fields, who recently received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Occupational Therapy from Winston-Salem State University, the first HBCU to become an Adobe Creative Campus. She shared that in her final semester of coursework, she was asked to create a digital story. While other students focused on straightforward healthcare topics, her professor gave her free reign to do something more personally meaningful: connect an aspect of occupational therapy to a story about being a step-parent.
Keshawna shared a portfolio with the audience of how she paired graphics, animation, sound, and voiceover to create a digital story, ultimately winning her the top prize in the Adobe Digital Edge Awards. As a student, she wasn’t familiar with generative AI tools early on, but as she thought more about them and even used Adobe Firefly to create a social media graphic for a book club, Keshawna shared how she learned to understand the advantages of generative AI with attendees.
We have access to these products and tools that can help you, that can push you a mile further, that can give you that extra boost, that can level you up, that can do all of these things just to make the products you’re creating bigger and better.”
Adobe's commitment to foster Digital Literacy, Access, and Equity
Education thought leaders believe that student success today hinges on becoming critical, ethical, agile, life-long learners of emerging information technologies – and that the best way to do so across every discipline and career path is for students to have access to these tools to enable them to learn by application and creative problem solving – to learn by making and creating solutions to pressing problems.
Adobe has long been on a mission to help institutions ensure student success by increasing student engagement, enabling career readiness, and driving digital transformation for institutional success.
The Adobe Creative Campus program recognizes colleges and universities worldwide that have empowered students in all disciplines with the opportunity to learn essential digital skills to succeed in the classroom and beyond.
What's new with Adobe
Resources
- Learn more about Adobe AI (Sensei & Firefly)
- Get inspired by the amazing projects students are creating across majors.
- Join our Digital Literacy Cafe Webinar series to enhance your digital skills and learn about the power of AI in the classroom.
Let's chat about how to empower your students and faculty
The changing education landscape and rise of generative AI tools provide institutions with a unique opportunity to reimagine how they teach, operate, and conduct research. By fostering a culture of innovation, higher education institutions can strengthen students' creativity and encourage them to be forward-thinking.
Contact us about your institution's opportunities and needs so we can explore solutions tailored to your vision.