Access to Creative Tools Prepares Students for the Future

Digital Fluency Provides New Means of Storytelling

“Digital fluency is important in every academic discipline,” Johnson says. “Visual presentation skills help our university community think beyond just what they’re researching. It helps answer the question, who is this meaningful to and how can it help them?”

With Adobe, students get new ways to tell their stories, and faculty members also benefit. “They’re able to see students create a range of ideas and communicate them in a more understandable and concise format,” she says.

“We also cannot forget about all the supporting departments and centers across the university. It’s important for administrators to build digital skills as well,” Johnson says.

To ensure students can make the most of the tools, the school offers microcredentials, which helps them craft compelling visuals and makes them more career-ready. “It gives them something to add to their LinkedIn profiles,” Johnson says.

“We’re seeing these verifiable credentials as increasingly important” in the eyes of potential employers, she says.

Canva Helps Students Create Dynamic Presentations

At the University of Richmond, students can access Canva for creative visual work.

“Canva Pro has a number of really great generative AI tools,” says Andrew Bell, a technology consultant and operations manager in the university’s Faculty Hub. With access to such tools, students can create presentations that are not only visually compelling but also subject-matter relevant.

At the same time, Canva helps faculty to address the risks of artificial intelligence. With students potentially tapping AI to write their papers, “faculty are looking to new types of assessments that can help them understand how effectively the students are thinking,” Bell says. “Digital projects are a good alternative there.”

To make the tools widely available, the school went big. “We signed a license with Canva Pro for all students,” Bell says, adding that this approach addresses fragmentation.

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“Professors who want to do digital projects in their courses have traditionally gone with ad hoc digital creation tools. We have some Adobe licenses, and some faculty rely on Apple tools, such as iMovie, Pages and Keynote,” he says.

The campuswide Canva license is easy for the IT team to manage and delivers a consistent experience. “Canva has single sign-on integration, which is really great. Our students don’t have to memorize a new credential,” he says. “Their authentication systems can integrate with the credentialing system that we already use.”

For schools looking to deliver creative tools, experts say it makes sense to take a close look at licensing. “Campus-encompassing licensing agreements are typically the strongest method to making software tools available to all students,” says Sean Grennan, a manager in the CIO advisory practice at accounting firm Wipfli.

With such agreements in place, IT teams can integrate the applications so students can use them as part of their their regular studies and creative workflows, he says.

Develop Professional Communication With Grammarly for Education

Creativity doesn’t just happen in the visual realm. Digital tools can also help students be more creative and more effective in their written work — a skill they will need as they move into the workforce.

Western Governors University puts Grammarly for Education to work as a way to help students elevate their efforts.

The school uses a dedicated team to evaluate student work, and team members noticed the assessments weren’t consistent.

“I’d hire a CPA to evaluate accounting courses and then ask them to evaluate grammar. We wanted to make sure we were giving consistent feedback to students, so we asked the evaluators to use Grammarly,” says Kirk Welter, vice president of evaluations.

From there, “we flipped the script and said, ‘Why don’t we just give every student Grammarly?’ That way they’re learning professional communication skills while they’re writing,” he says.

How does that work in practice? “When a student gets ready to submit, we bounce their work off Grammarly, and Grammarly returns numbers through an application programming interface. We convert that into a score, and we tell the student, ‘You’re going to pass this aspect, or you’re not going to pass this aspect,’” Welter says.

Evaluators can fine-tune the criteria; for example, by setting a higher bar for written excellence in a presentation compared with something intended only as background documentation. The IT team has played a key role here.

“We built our evaluation system internally through our ed tech group, and they built the interface with the API from Grammarly,” Welter says. “They built the functionality for each course to have a selectable bar — how we would translate the data into a score to bounce against that bar — and then we can automatically populate a score for professional communications.”

All this helps students prepare for the future, making them more career-ready.

“Now we have a much more consistent review, which is important,” Welter says. “If someone needs support in professional communications, we want to get that to them right away. It is very important to have confidence in your skills and to see your communication skills ratchet up. That unleashes creativity.”