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 NYC hosted on February 8, 2024, at Adobe's Times Square offices.
We’re going from a world where we always had to find someone to tell our story, to a world where we can truly tell our own story. We’re going from a world where creative tools were very exclusive, to creativity becoming very democratized.” — Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Adobe
Key takeaways from the event
Throughout the day, common threads emerged in the speaker presentations and the informal discussions over lunch and breaks. Reflecting on the event, here are the themes that rose to the top:
- As AI automates more and more of our rote work, creativity is becoming even more essential as a way for students to differentiate themselves in the job market.
- Students want to use creative and generative AI tools in their coursework, and their engagement deepens when they do so.
- 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. Adobe Express offers an accessible, affordable, scalable, responsible way to put generative AI in the hands of all students.
- Institutions need to help faculty learn to teach in new ways, including with creative and generative AI tools. Small incentives and small-scale projects can help inspire faculty to dive in, experiment, and start imagining ways to redesign their curriculum.
- When getting digital transformation initiatives off the ground, IT, administration, and faculty need to work closely together to ensure that new technologies support the core curriculum and desired student outcomes. Institutions can also 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 comments on generative AI
Todd Taylor, Adobe Pedagogical Evangelist and English Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, kicked off the event proceedings by welcoming attendees and conducting an icebreaker to introduce them.
Todd opened 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 also acknowledged good news, 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.
Creativity and AI: Five Waves of Change
Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, kicked off the speaker sessions by providing an in-depth look at five key ways generative AI is changing the way people work, learn, and live:
- Creativity is the new productivity. Belsky said that while people used to succeed at work based on how much they got done, computing power has made productivity a given. Now, people stand out with their ability to express their ideas in compelling and persuasive ways.
- Creative confidence is growing. Most people stop developing their creative skills after childhood, but generative AI makes everyone capable of expressing ideas with compelling content.
- The opportunity of creative exploration is expanding. Belsky said that, rather than take away work from students going into creative professions, generative AI will help them produce more ideas and creative work faster.
- The future of every digital experience will be personalized. Thanks to AI, people will soon feel that brands and apps know them.
- People will crave story, craft, and meaning more than ever. When content is personalized, creative pros can produce more in less time, and anyone can create compelling content; people will place a high value on content that’s counterintuitive, emotional, and grounded in life experiences — content that AI isn’t capable of generating. At the end of the day, Belsky said, “Creativity that is effective is creativity that moves us.”
Belsky added that colleges and universities need to teach students to first verify content before trusting it. He said that Adobe Firefly is designed to respect artists’ rights and mitigate harm and bias, and that the Content Authenticity Initiative is working to build provenance signals into media to help people decide what’s trustworthy.
Transformation, Technology, and Pedagogy: Closing the Digital Gap in Higher Education
Next, Seton Hall University’s Interim President Katia Passerini and Chief Information Officer Paul Fisher shared their institution’s approach to preparing students for career success with technologies like Adobe Creative Cloud and generative AI.
Passerini noted that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet, so faculty “who tend to teach the way they learned” need to continuously retool themselves to understand and use new technologies. And while some faculty are pushing back, she said it’s important “to make early adopters your evangelists and keep pushing ahead.” She said that since Seton Hall wants to provide students with digital mastery, she and her team are fostering close collaboration between business strategy, IT strategy, organizational infrastructure, and IT infrastructure and processes.
Bringing the IT perspective, Fisher said that his team evaluates every new piece of technology to ensure that it reinforces the core curriculum. It must enable creative problem-solving, creation and making, communication fluency, information fluency, and a culture of failure in a low-stakes environment. Fisher credits his team’s successful push for digital literacy to:
- A governance process that brings faculty, students, and administrators together to agree on common goals and move together with one voice
- Solid foundations that include equal access to technology for all students, access to support, and meaningful curricular integration in a way that shows ROI
- Innovation incentives to get faculty to try new technology and share their experiences and successes
Fisher shared an infographic, podcast, and other media projects students have made with Creative Cloud.
It’s very clear that with access to the tools, we’re enabling students to really practice the concepts that faculty members are teaching them.”
Creating Boldly with Adobe
Next, Sheneese Shereena Thompson — Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University (BSU) — shared how her HBCU is working to close the digital divide for its predominantly Black and female student population. Having made it a top priority to integrate Creative Cloud tools into the curriculum, leaders and faculty are “creating boldly and collaborating boldly” in the following ways:
- Learning to use Creative Cloud tools through sessions hosted by Adobe’s Educational Development Institute
- Sharing best practices with other Adobe Creative Campuses
- Holding a faculty institute for pedagogical training
- Hosting a day of hands-on Creative Cloud workshops as part of their instructional technology conference
Students are now telling stories digitally in courses spanning business, health sciences, education, and more:
- The Career Readiness team and Entrepreneurship Center are teaching students to design their own brand kits with Adobe Express.
- In a film class, students wrote screenplays and used Adobe Firefly generative AI to create character visuals. “They learned to use AI as a tool as opposed to a crutch,” Thompson said.
- In her own class, Thompson replaced term papers with podcasts, and found that “students will overachieve if given the opportunity.”
It’s important that students can compose and communicate in multiple modalities,” she said. When they learn to use creative and generative AI tools, “it changes how they engage with the world — they become more engaged with engaging others.”
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.