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, you will find a recap of our recent event in Boston hosted on February 6, 2024, at Boston University.
Our goal is to inspire faculty to try something new, so if they integrate these [creative and generative AI] tools in the classroom, we consider that the win. We know that, across the board, from course evaluations of those faculty and feedback that they get, students are absolutely buying in and enjoying and getting value out of these tools.” — Justin Hodgson, Director of IU Digital Gardener Initiative at Indiana University
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:
- Students want to use creative and generative AI tools in their coursework, and their engagement deepens when they do so. They want faculty to support their efforts, and they want clear guidelines around how and when they can use generative AI as an academic partner.
- 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 understand generative AI and give them opportunities to do the hands-on work of designing their own digital stories with creative 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 learning and innovation initiatives off the ground, institutions can save time by collaborating with other schools to build off their best practices.
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.
Growing Student Success and Digital Literacy through Faculty Development
Justin Hodgson kicked off the sessions by discussing the connection between faculty development and students’ digital skills. Hodgson is Indiana University’s Director of the Digital Gardener Initiative, a next-generation innovation hub designed to cultivate students’ critical skills around digital literacy and creativity. He and IU’s leadership particularly want to address “double jeopardy digital inequity,” the idea that if we don’t put digital tools into the hands of underrepresented students, they’ll be at an additional disadvantage.
Since faculty development is essential to success with digital literacy, Hodgson and team have set up a badging program that includes hands-on learning sessions covering pedagogy, practice, purpose, and more.
“We want to set the bar low for what faculty need to complete, and we want to raise the opportunity for them to communicate with each other. Our number one goal is not upskilling, but cultivating a community of digital innovators.”
Still, he said he appreciates how easy it is for faculty to start creating digital media with Adobe Express.
The thing I love about Adobe Creative Cloud is that it goes from zero to professional,” he said. “It’s a one-stop shop, no matter where your skills fall. And then you can slowly progress up through the system.”
Ultimately, Hodgson wants to counter the culture of fear and policing around generative AI and get faculty thinking about using the tools to build better learning experiences, assignments, and assessments. He’s incentivizing hesitant faculty by awarding small grants and by sharing early adopters’ projects and successes institution-wide. Students are incentivizing faculty as well, because they’re starting to demand that their courses integrate creative tools and generative AI.
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.”
Digital Learning and Innovation with Emerging Technologies
The event concluded with a presentation by Chris Dellarocas, director of Digital Learning & Innovation (DL&I) at Boston University. DL&I is a trio of organizations that educate faculty, support academic innovation, foster community, and serve as a strategic resource around the use of technology for teaching and learning.
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, DL&I has supported projects, including the student-led creation of a schoolwide policy on the use of generative AI, a faculty survey and symposium, and a web page of AI resources.
Dellarocas cited the following initiatives as some of the best examples of “the marriage of faculty and technology” at BU:
- An edtech subcommittee that evaluates new AI features in all software tools used on campus
- Webinars that help faculty update their syllabi, use AI to produce class materials, redesign assessments, examine ethics and security, and learn about AI tools like Adobe Firefly
- A grant program that awards $5K to faculty members who experiment with integrating generative AI into their courses
In one grant project, a data sciences professor created a ChatGPT-powered tutor to help students in programming classes. In another, an assistant professor of graphic design had students use Adobe Firefly as a partner in their creative process, inspiring them to explore and expand on their artistic influences.
Our purpose, in addition to encouraging experimentation, is to have a connection to what’s happening in a very decentralized way,” Dellarocas said. If the DL&I team finds that projects are having an impact, they do some analytics and documentation to “see if there are opportunities for something new to be created and push our knowledge forward.”
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.