This week, at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) ISTELive24 annual conference, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced strong growth in the number of K-12 and higher education students and teachers worldwide who have access to the company’s industry-leading creative solutions, driven by exponential expansion of Adobe Express for Education across more campuses as well as new partnerships.
At the event, Adobe Express was also named to this year’s EdTech Top 40 list. The prestigious list is part of an annual report by LearnPlatform that features the most commonly accesses ed-tech tools for K-12 in the United States.
Adobe Express for Education is the all-in-one AI creativity app that makes creative skill building easy. It is designed to be classroom safe with responsible generative AI features that are collaborative, easy and improve student engagement and impact communication skills. With Adobe Express for Education, students and teachers can easily design presentations, reports, resumes, videos, PDFs, animations, websites, posters and flyers.
“Given the high expectations and commitments students face, we’re incredibly excited to see so much momentum and growth for Adobe Express among tens of millions of students and teachers around the world,” said Mala Sharma, VP and general manager, creators and education for Adobe’s Digital Media Business. “We look forward to introducing new innovations in Adobe Express that will provide our global teacher and student community with even more easy and fun ways learn, create and collaborate with responsible AI.”
Equipping Students with Next-Gen Work Skills
Adobe has also seen significant year-over-year growth in Asia, including the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) that will bring Adobe Express to more than 10,000 technical institutions across India and a new Adobe Creative Campus in New Zealand and Japan. Torrens University, Think Education and Media Design School is a leading post-secondary education network offering undergraduate, graduate and technical vocational credentials across Australia and New Zealand and The Ritsumeikan Trust, which includes two universities in Japan.
Adobe has a long-standing partnership with higher education institutions around the world to help ensure that every student is equipped with the skills employers seek in today’s workplace, including creative problem solving, visual communication, collaboration, creativity, and the responsible use of AI. Today, nearly 6 million higher education students globally can access Adobe creative apps through their campuses.
In the United States, institutions including Penn State, a world-class public research university that spans 25 campuses throughout Pennsylvania and four campuses within the California State University (CSU) system, the largest and most diverse four-year public university system in the country, now have access to Adobe creative tools. More than half of CSU students come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, and nearly one-third of undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college.
The CSU schools are committed to delivering quality and equitable education for all, which includes closing the digital divide to give its 130,000 yearly graduates the technical and digital skills required to succeed in modern workplaces. “People worldwide equate the Adobe brand with quality, creativity and innovation,” said Cynthia Teniente-Matson, President of SJSU. “By bringing Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Express into classrooms, we’ve reimagined how we serve historically underrepresented student populations. They now have easier and quicker access to tools to learn skills that set them up for future success.”
Both Penn State and CSUs are Adobe Creative Campus partners, a growing community of higher education institutions across North America, Europe, Asia and Japan committed to boosting student outcomes and career success through equitable access to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Express.
Kent State University in Ohio, Sheridan College in Canada, Marshall University in West Virginia, Northern Arizona University, Sheridan College in Canada and the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science & Forestry (ESF) in New York are all new Adobe Creative Campuses. “This is a terrific benefit to ESF’s students, who now have additional access to creative tools and the opportunity to boost their digital skills. Our Adobe Creative Campus status is the perfect complement to ESF’s,” said
SUNY ESF President Joanie Mahoney. “As our world becomes increasingly digital, we are excited to extend these new tools to all students so they can learn to sharpen their skills and stand out after graduation.”
“Ritsumekan aims to become a next-generation research university, promoting the expanded recombination of research and education and the cultivation of innovation and emerging talent,” said Yoshio Nakatani, President. “As an Adobe Creative Campus, Ritsumeikan will strive to raise the level of creative skills throughout the university by enhancing hands-on training opportunities for students, faculty and staff, enhancing university-wide skill development opportunities using on-demand materials and demonstrating our commitment to the latest technologies, such as generative AI.”
Naomi Cocks, associate professor in the School of Allied Health at Curtin University in Australia, aims to help her students become capable problem-solvers whether they eventually seek jobs in the city or across the globe. Using Adobe Express, Cocks asks students to take a creative approach to synthesizing and sharing their learnings with peers and the broader community. “Adobe Express supports a teaching methodology that emphasizes active and playful learning,” she said. “Some typically quiet students really shine in this task because it’s a different way of tapping into their creativity.”
A Global K-12 Education Ecosystem
Adobe Express for Education is free for K-12 and empowers student expression, critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills for tens of millions of teachers and students globally. With Adobe Express, K-12 students can apply new technology and creativity skills to make presentations, infographics, GIFs, videos, animations, web pages and more with unique capabilities like Animate Characters, drawing and PDF editing.
Adobe also announced a prestigious partnership with the Ministry of Education in India for K-12 and higher education to bring Adobe Express into schools to help develop skills and enhance learning
outcomes. India’s national education policy emphasizes the use of digital tools and AI to help build creativity skills for future readiness. Adobe is working with schools in India’s Central Board of Secondary Education as well as the Indian government’s Pradhan Mantri Schools for Rising India (PM SHRI) program to build digital creativity skills and upskill educators to support integrating Adobe Express into their curriculum. In addition, Adobe recently collaborated with India’s National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) to host Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat content on their national platform.
The New South Wales Department of Education in Australia is one example of an institution committed to enabling equitable, inclusive access to essential digital tools and provides Adobe Express and Adobe Creative Cloud applications to all K-12 students. According to the institution’s CFO Charlie Sukkar: “I have witnessed first-hand the positive impact of Adobe's products in our Schools. Especially in high schools.”
New K-12 partnerships with MagicSchool and NBC Universal News Group’s education initiative NBCU Academy are bringing Adobe’s creative technologies to even more K-12 students and teachers globally.
MagicSchool describes their platform as the “award-winning, most used and most loved AI platform for schools in the world.” Educators use MagicSchool to help create lesson plans, differentiate, write assessments, write IEPs, communicate clearly and more. MagicSchool is integrating Adobe’s Firefly- powered Text to Image features into the context of the MagicSchool experience, making Firefly the only generative AI feature on the platform and helping empower student expression and critical thinking skills with responsible generative AI that is designed to be safe for the classroom. Intuitive Adobe generative AI features like Text-to-Image, Text Effects, Generative Insert and Generative Remove are accompanied by Adobe guardrails on generative AI prompts and outputs, encouraging appropriate use. Adobe also gives districts control over whether generative AI features are turned on or off and does not include student projects in training datasets for generative AI.
“We're excited to bring Adobe Express' AI image generation capabilities to educators and students in the MagicSchool platform,” said Adeel Khan, CEO & Founder of MagicSchool.ai. “We've known that generating images with AI sparks curiosity and creativity in schools – but we wanted to put safety and responsibility first in launching it to our millions of users. Adobe is the perfect partner because they've built their tools responsibly from the ground up for the safety needs of schools in mind.”
In April, Adobe and NBCUniversal News Group’s education initiative NBCU Academy launched The Edit, a first-of-its-kind program in the United States aimed at helping students build key digital media and literacy skills Students use tutorials and guidance on how to script, record and publish news reports using Adobe Express
