Authentic Assessment across the Curriculum with Adobe Express and Firefly Todd Taylor, PhD -- Adobe Pedagogical Evangelist

I am pleased to announce a new series of curated HED assessment templates and video tutorials showcasing a wide range of creative projects made with Adobe Express for Back-to-School 2025.

https://tinyurl.com/AdobeOER

https://tinyurl.com/AdobeOER

July 9 CRTL Webinar: Authentic Assessment across the Curriculum with Adobe Express and Firefly

The purpose of this session is to first establish why authentic assessment can be a uniquely effective approach to learning and then demonstrate how Adobe Express with Firefly can make that easy to do so, especially for instructors who might be new to such approaches, both pedagogical and technologically.

The session will engage in conversation and demonstration and ultimately leave behind a practical, easy-to-use “starter kit” appropriate to learning and teaching with Adobe Express in any discipline.

Adobe Express with Firefly is currently the most affordable, scalable, easy-to-use, and responsible way to enable authentic multimodal assessment across the entire college curriculum. UTA has just begun its journey as an Adobe Creative Campus.

Students in Professor Jack Monell's criminal justice courses use Adobe Express to create social media campaigns to raise awareness about people who have been wrongly incarcerated in North Carolina.

Authentic Assessment using emerging technologies can:

  • improve content attainment and retention
  • develop transferable skills
  • increase student engagement
  • enable Universal Design Learning
  • move students away from content consumption toward idea production
  • cultivate agency and self-efficacy
  • encourage students to create something worth putting on a resume

Regardless of the preferred names for these engaging, high-impact practices, they are defined by three fundamentals.

(1) Authentic assessment is applied: it aims to connect student work directly with the world around them and the future ahead of them to develop transferable skills.

(2) Authentic assessment is active: it moves students away from being passive, isolated consumers of other people’s content toward them becoming active, connected producers of their own ideas through critical and creative thinking.

(3) Authentic assessment is transdisciplinary: it is unconstrained by rigid academic boundaries, genres, and modalities.

State of the Art for Authentic Multimodal Assessment BTS 2025

https://tinyurl.com/AdobeOER

https://tinyurl.com/AdobeOER

Todd Taylor, PhD

My name is Todd Taylor, and I serve as an Adobe Higher Education Pedagogical Evangelist. I am also a former Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I directed the FY writing program for over 10 years.

ttaylor@adobe.com

CREATED BY
Todd Taylor

Credits:

Created with images by ARAMYAN - "Blurred background with blurred light color gradient." • zulie - "A group of four young scientists wearing lab coats and safety glasses are examining plants in a garden."