[Music] [Mala Sharma] All right. [Mala Sharma] Good morning everyone. How is everyone doing? Good. Had your coffees. Thanks for showing up to ATM session. I hope you're having a great time with Adobe Max. Yes. Yes. Great. Awesome. How many of you are here for the first time at Max, in person? Wow. Welcome. Thank you for being here. And who are the veterans? Have been here at least three times or more. Wonderful. Well, thank you. All the newbies connect with the veterans. Get the tips. Find out what's cool at Max and how to get make the most of your time here. Thank you again for literally weathering the storm and being here with us.
I know all of you are incredibly passionate about the work you do, which is all about enabling the next generation to be ready for their future careers. And this is very much aligned with what Adobe cares about. And for me personally as well.
For me, it all started with, watching my mother and the way she spent her time, as a teacher. She taught until she was 80. She lives in India, and, used to go every weekend to teach street children in Mumbai, India. And the impact she had in the lives of thousands of children. Really inspired me. She's my inspiration. And this is why I'm here. And the conversations I have with all of you as educators and leaders and your students is what wakes me up in the morning is my motivation. So thank you for taking the trip and let us jump in.
All right. Adobe's vision is to enable the world through digital experiences. We want to change the world through digital experiences. And we do this in many ways. We do this through our technology. We do this through the work that we do with schools and every aspect of personal and professional success. All of this starts with education. We've all been students at one point, and many of us hope to be and strive to be lifelong learners. And this is why Adobe has made such a significant investment in learning and making our products accessible to students through decades of partnerships with colleges, universities, schools, non-profits and governments.
We have a track record of innovation across new tech eras, including the current one we are in, which is a major shift. The generative AI revolution. You've heard all through Max, about Adobe's innovations in this space, and education has the most important part in ensuring it is implemented as a powerful tool to augment creativity and critical thinking safely, responsibly, and equitably. AI is here. Yes, all of us realize that. It is rapidly evolving, and we need to partner together to empower this generation of students to succeed in this rapidly changing landscape.
When we think about student success, we think about it holistically. We think about the academic success of the student. their careers, as well as their personal success and well-being.
And of course, success needs to be equitable and available to vulnerable and underrepresented students as well. I'd like to share a little about what Adobe is doing to help further all of these initiatives.
Starting with academic success. Our goal is to design our offerings to be ready for the classroom. How many of you have tried Adobe Express for K12 for classrooms? Anybody in here? Yes. I hope you see the difference. It's our first product versus all the products we've had. We've really thought about what are the needs of the teacher and the students in the classroom. We've built a capability of classrooms where a teacher can assign a student and their entire class a project, and she can see the work and the progress with the child is making in real time. Get feedback to the, to the student in real time, and help their learning. So we've built these templates, assignments, content, and learning in our product that's tailored to be used for use cases. Excuse me, in K-12 and for college students, whether it's lesson plans, research posters, presentations and worksheets and many, many more use cases. We've also built integrations with LMS' is the ones that you're used to using, and your students are used to using, including rostering programs as well as new generative AI classroom tools like Magic School AI and Abdiel and this team are in the room. Thank you for your partnership Abdiel. He and his team work really hard to make the lives of teachers easy, so that they can put their energy into the class. And this is not just for K-12, but also higher ed. So thank you for being here with your team Abdiel and all the work you do.
The second part about academic success is how it relates to bringing AI to the classroom. And we've spent a lot of time thinking about that as you know, the Adobe Firefly product and offering is the only offering that's safe for classrooms. We ensure that there are filters and guardrails for appropriate content. We attach content credentials, which is incredibly important to all creations so creators get the credit for their work. We've also developed curricula on content authenticity and to increase awareness of the importance of attribution and creator rights and ethics and creativity. And very importantly, we do not train our models on teacher, student, or any Adobe customer's content. These commitments collectively are designed to help students feel safe, confident, and empowered to experiment with the AI and make what they want in any format they'd like. Using AI to augment but never replace their creativity.
Finally, academic success is about supporting all of you as educators. We continue to grow and evolve our educator community programs. We've just recently added a new tier, of the Adobe Creative Educator program. It's called Adobe Creative Educator Innovators. If you'd like to find out more about that, please speak with Sasha, who is in the room who is distributing the raffle tickets. She can tell you more about it. We also have a program for the higher education, community called the Adobe Education Institutes. We trained tens of thousands of teachers every year through either self-paced courses on the Adobe Education Exchange or with many of our partners. Thank you for being in the room, for helping us train teachers, as well as many of you who partner with us to teach other teachers like yourselves.
Last but not the least, better is together. We are a founding advisory member and sponsor of the Teach AI Initiative. Spearheaded by Code.org, ISTE, Khan Academy, ETS, and the World Economic Forum. We formed this group to form an alliance of hundreds of organizations, departments of education and educational institutions to ensure that AI literacy is built thoughtfully and meaningfully for students.
Beyond academics, Career success is incredibly important for these students. And AI is going to be part of their lives irregardless of what job they do, whether they're a marketer, they take on finance. They are in HR. Of course, in marketing departments, AI is going to be core to what work they do at their jobs. And we are committed to preparing them for what the industry will require of this new generation. The Adobe Certified Professional Program turned 17 this year. Yes! Yay! And we've added certificates for Adobe Express and for Acrobat. We've also introduced shorter, self-paced courses where students can learn the importance of AI in their workplace. For example, what does AI look like If you're a marketer? What does it look like if you're presenting, making a presentation or making a pitch? Event marketing, podcasting and many more examples.
As you heard from Shantanu, our CEO yesterday, Adobe Digital Academy, as part of this commitment to training, the next generation will be providing certifications and Adobe Express with the goal of reaching 30 million learners globally by 2030. Yes, we're going to get very busy doing this. These certificate programs will be available through Adobe's collaborators like Coursera and General Assembly, NGOs, K-12 schools, universities, and also within the Adobe applications. Adobe is also funding scholarships and NGO grants to ensure learners of all backgrounds can benefit from these certificates. And of course, academic and career success is inextricably connected with a person's sense of purpose and their personal well-being.
Adobe is incredibly proud of the partnerships we have with nonprofits like the National Alliance of Mental Illness, the Jed Foundation, the AD Council, and the Museum. Residency and internship programs to empower the next generation to be prepared for this world of AI. With that, I'll leave you with this. This is the most important time in the history for education. It is time for us to lead and help shape the next generation of thinkers and creators. And now I'm excited to introduce Brian Johnsrud, our head of education, thought leadership, and student success, who will give you a sneak peek of some of the latest global research we've just concluded. In the age of AI and what that means for student success. Please join me in welcoming Brian. Brian. [Brian Johnsrud] Good morning everyone. It's lovely to see you bright and early on a Tuesday morning. I'm Brian Johnsrud. I was a former K 12, educator. And then when I got to enter the world of higher ed after finishing my PhD, I had the privilege of creating a research laboratory at Stanford University, where we got to rapidly build Ed Tech tools and then find ways to quickly research the impact that they were having in classrooms. That was sort of the early days of, of edtech educational research actually measure their outcomes. So one of my favorite jobs that I get to do at Adobe is continue this kind of research, both to see the impact that we're having in classrooms today, but also with AI. It's so new, this other genre that we call sort of prospecting research to see where we're going, what teachers are doing today and how they're thinking of creativity and AI in the classroom put together. So for those of you who have been to Max before, day two is Sneaks day, where we sneak a lot of new product innovations. This is sneaks of our full global research that we'll be sharing in a few weeks. But you're all here with me today, so I'll give you a sneak peek.
Continuing, um, on the theme of.
Move this over for a second on the theme of holistic, student success. This was our research question going into this study, how our K-12 and higher ed educators today, viewing the role of creativity and AI as amplifiers of student success in these domains. We have some existing research over here on creativity. There's some budding research on AI, but we wanted to put those two together and see what kind of outcomes we can expect. There. And how did those views and practices impact student outcomes today? So our methodology was we, partnered with Advanis Research, and we surveyed almost 3000 educators K-12 and higher ed and the US and the UK. And what was exciting about this is often when you do survey research, you find out what's happening, and then you're so curious about the "why." And so we actually invested in a new methodology with multiple really in-depth essay responses and qualitative insights. So educators could tell us this is what I'm thinking. This is what I'm doing with my students. But here's why. And so we ended up getting thousands and thousands of paragraphs and essays from educators that we could start analyzing to actually see those case studies.
And the sample ended up being representative across K-12 and higher ed, with a distribution across subjects and disciplines and years of teaching experience.
So at the first pass, what most people want to do, a pulse of what's happening with AI, especially AI for content creation in the classroom today. And what we saw here on the left is teachers are reporting that 89% of students are creating with AI for their classes, 20% of them are requiring their students to do this. 69% said that it's optional and 11% said they're not using it or I'm not aware that they're using it. On the right, we saw that 67% of students are creating with AI for their coursework at least weekly and 21% daily. Now, this is the moment where when you're doing a global research study, there's a lot of nuance and we're looking at averages. So I know that there's going to be outliers here. And so the first pass I always want to do is say, well, what are the differences based off of what they're teaching or years of teaching experience and what we have found and others have started doing this early research is those aren't really strong signals for the different cohorts that are really pioneering or a little bit more reticent. And so what we did in this study is we actually started creating cohorts based on the kinds of instructional practices that teachers did in the classroom. And so we asked them, what do you teach? How do you teach, how often? to create different cohorts that we call and the first one a high focus on creativity cohort. So here's what we did. These, research participants were very patient with us. We asked them, which of these things do you do in your classroom and how often do your students demonstrate them? So they dove deep into, do I do these different things up on top? Daily, weekly, monthly, annually or not at all? And do I see my students doing that in the classroom? All of those, they got positive scores. They got a decrease in their focus on creativity. If they reported high usage of their instructional time for memorizing facts and definitions and preparing standardized tests.
Thank you for being patient with my research brain. But what we ended up doing was creating cohorts here and the top 25th percentile that we called high focus on creativity. They're doing the stuff with their students a lot and the lowest 25th percentile. These kinds of practices aren't showing up into their classroom very frequently.
And this is where the data gets interesting. That same research that I was, those same statistics I was showing you before. These are where the outliers and the differences really start showing. So the rainbow spectrum, that's that top 25th percentile of educators who have that higher focus on creativity. And the grayer the lower the 25th, lower percentile. And that's where we see, for instance, those creative instructional educators have almost two times the amount of their students having to use these tools in their classroom, giving them the opportunity to practice content creation about them. And content creation in the study was writ large. Writing image creation, making slides, anything that's active learning versus passive learning or multiple choice.
When we then looked at frequency, what was really cool was that these educators who have this commitment to these kinds of practices also end up having this commitment to innovation, to trying these new tools and not making them a one and done. But we see 46% of them said, I'm not just doing this with my students. We're doing it every day. Light little activities, we're practicing it, and we're integrating into our curriculum. Whereas those who had lower instances of these kinds of creative practices were doing much lower instances of actual AI integration.
When it comes to the actual impact on student creativity, these were the percentages of educators who agreed with this question strongly agree. If used thoughtfully, Generative AI has the ability to increase students creativity and critical thinking skills. What's exciting about this is there's actually a lot of general agreement here between those high focus and low focus. They all see the potential. And one of the reasons we wanted to ask this question is this is kind of the question of the hour, not just for creativity, but critical thinking, sort of like when calculators came out. There's so much opportunity to use them in the math class. But oh my gosh, our students are not going to learn math, are they not? Don't ever learn how to add or divide. You know, it took us about 30 years to answer that question. And then finally we realize, oh, no, they actually learn mathematical thinking better with these sensitive calculators. We don't have 30 years because AI is moving very quickly. So that was the heart of this question. Where are you at educators? And this belief that AI can actually increase and augment creativity? When we then asked them what kinds of practices or thinking skills do you think have the biggest potential to be, improved with creativity? The ones that ranked the highest and top three We're brainstorming and ideating, and this is actually the part of any creative thinking process that has had the most empirical research done in the past couple of years, where they've actually shown students and do brainstorm more and do come up with more original ideas with the assistance of AI.
Number two was creative demonstrations of learning, and number three was creative self-reflection. And again, what's interesting here is these two cohorts. They both see the potential. They both know that these things are important skills to be taught and that AI can help. The different gaps are the instructors who are more used to doing real world, authentic, hands on creative practices. Of course, integrating these AI tools into their workflow is a natural fit with their pedagogical practices and pedagogical beliefs.
Now, this last or this next slide is really exciting for me because when we step back then and say, what are all the big learning outcomes we want for students, we want them to practice all sorts of cognitive and learning skills.
When we then asked these educators, how often are your students demonstrating each of these cognitive skills? At least weekly. This was really exciting because not only was it consistent across the board, but for those of you who do empirical research, this is incredibly statistically significant across the board, whether it's critical and analytical thinking, problem solving, retaining what they've learned, probably the most important lifelong skill curiosity. Making connections across subjects, resilience. The instructors who gave their students the opportunity to do these things in the classroom more often saw improvements across all of these areas and all of these dimensions.
So when we put it together and we asked them, so your highly creative educators, your students are having these experiences, you're using AI. What's the biggest potential? If we know creativity so important, how are you saying AI is helping you with that? And these are the themes that came up.
When we asked, how can AI increase this creativity and amplify students' success? The first was reduced instructional time, reducing the time needed to teach students all the manual steps to create from a blank canvas, whether that's writing an essay or designing a poster, or creating a film.
The second rubric that came out was reduced activity time, especially for K-12 educators. We have such short classes and such rigid curriculum and such brutal standards. Even fitting in a ten minute supplementary activity is a lot. And so the notion that I wanted I've always wanted to do these things, but it would take three hours. And now I see a world in which I can do it in ten minutes with my students and give them this opportunity. That theme came up again and again.
The third was removing design and communication barriers between a student's great idea and seeing that idea brought to life. And a lot of the quotes and case studies from this research. You heard a lot of teachers, especially in the lower grades, in K-12, saying, I have this brilliant student. They're so special. But the media by which they have to communicate to me that they know something they struggle with. They struggle with writing. They struggle with expressing themselves. They're shy. And so presentations in front of the class, all of these examples of these teachers, which all the best teachers do, seeing their students knowing that they're getting it, but not having the right modalities for them to fully express that.
And last but not least, increase personalization of outputs with really descriptive prompts that allow for that greater self-expression and those individualized creations. And I was a former English teacher. So of course, I think we actually have the superpower when it comes to prompt engineering, because we own adjectives, we own figurative language. And so you have those ELA students, and even, college, aspiring poets realizing they actually have a little bit of an edge when it comes to prompt engineering because they own adjectives.
When we then, step back and ask questions beyond academic outcomes, the top three student success outcomes, that can be increased by learning AI. When we asked educators how how beneficial do you think AI is going to be? These were the ones who said very beneficial and this is one of those slides where we saw really differences and an understanding of the potential of this technology from those high creative practice educators. College readiness, 64% of those said there's a really high potential for AI to help with that outcome, 65% for career readiness. The reason I didn't say beneficial and very beneficial is because when you put those together, it's like 99%. So it took the extreme very beneficial. And last but not least, self-expression and personal well-being. That personal side, and this is really a passion of mine, because last year, one of our major studies was actually looking at this connection between creativity and mental well-being in the classroom, both for teachers and for students. And when we asked these K-12 teachers, in particular, who are doing creative activities with their students, what impact do you see it having? 95% said that fostering creativity leads to better mental health and less stress for themselves and students alike. And so many quotes like this: "The impacts..." (This is an educator), "...on my own mental health from using creativity are obvious." "There used to be days where I didn't want to wake up and go to work." "On the days when I use creative learning, I'm excited to go to work," "...and anyone who's been in the classroom" "and knows those days...'this is a sit and get standardized test day.'" "This is day we're actually creating something." "That is what's going to your head when you're walking out of the classroom." "This is going to be a good day, or this is going to be a day." "...where we just kind of have to get through it." And there was a thread and a lot of the last year's research that looked like this, this quote that says, "helping students be creative "...is one of the things that inspired me to be a teacher." "...I love watching students find creative outlets." "...It gives me purpose and my profession." "...And after all, like, isn't that what we all want?" "...That's why most people became teachers." "...And I think the greatest gift we can give our students..." "...is that they understand what their sense of purpose is." "...And the more I've been digging into this," "...the more I realize the power of purpose." And then You heard us announce yesterday a partnership with Coursera, one of their most popular courses and a real visionary on there is about purpose. His name is, Vic Strecher, And he's done research because actually an empirical way to measure someone's sense of purpose. You answer a bunch of questions on how you feel about your life, and because it is a "high sense of purpose" or "low sense of purpose" person.
When it comes to careers, 70% of Americans say that they define their sense of purpose through work, and businesses that put purpose on the forefront tend to be more enjoyable places to work and more financially successful in the long run. So we know, and I think intuitively have a sense that your career and the work that you do, if there's a sense of purpose that's important. But the more I've looked into this research, the more I've seen stuff that is, is shocking. And I think just really cool. So, Vic, who I mentioned before, is actually in the Department of Public Health, he's a doctor, and he's studied correlations between health outcomes and a sense of purpose. And his studies and those of his colleagues have shown that those with a strong sense of purpose, they live longer, they sleep better, they have a more robust immune system, lower stress levels. It's pretty wild how much this having the sense of purpose can affect really every part of your life. And when they look at the different domains of what gives a person a sense of purpose, one of them is creative pursuits that people can score highly on, saying, I find my sense of purpose no matter what I'm doing, whether I'm learning or I'm working, or my, hobbies or activities when I'm creating, when I'm designing solutions, when I'm innovating, when I'm doing new things, that's what lights me up and gives me a sense of purpose.
So what does this look like for students today? The next generation needs to find purpose more than ever. When we start at the younger ages, 80% of young people say that they don't have a clear sense of their purpose. But those who do report a strong sense of purpose and younger ages tend to have better mental health and are more resilient against setbacks.
By the time we get to high school, things haven't gotten much better. 58% of young adults say they lack meaning or purpose in their lives, and half reported that their mental health was negatively influenced by not knowing what to do with my life. And one could say, "Well, that's what college is for. College is... to explore and to find yourself and to look at other majors." But it turns out colleges aren't helping students find that sense of purpose as much as they can, either. Other 95% of college graduates consider a sense of purpose at least moderately important in their work. But of those, only 40% of recent graduates are actually finding that, sense of purpose or a meaningful career.
So in a couple of weeks, when this research comes out, this is a sneak peak. We've done that correlation of teachers who are highly creative. Now we're doing a pass through all of these questions with those teachers who score high on sense of purpose or low on sense of purpose. And what we really want to know is if we know creativity is infectious and that passes on to your kids, how much is that sense of purpose infectious? And what can we do to support you all with the right tools and the content and the curriculum, to make sure your students are being creative? They're trying out these new technologies. But more importantly, I wouldn't be a big teacher if I didn't, or I wouldn't be a teacher if I didn't end with a big question how can AI help your students practice creativity more and set them up for academic career and personal success with a greater sense of purpose? With that big question on the air, you've been hearing enough for me. I want to invite our panel up here to have a discussion on some of these topics, and we have such a cool group. I would love to, invite up to the stage Nishy Lall, Chana Messer, and Mala Sharma. Please join me in welcoming them.
Let me start with introductions. To our first two new guests. Nishy Lall is the head of Youth and Social Impact at Sky, and has designed and launched programs to help youth from all backgrounds build digital and storytelling skills programs that are going to be reaching over 250,000 students in the next two years. She has many accolades. And so I just chose my favorite because I think it's the most impressive, and it really speaks to the work that she does. And in 2022, she was awarded the Drum Award for changemaker of the year.
Yes. Let's give it up for Nishy. And Hannah Messer, who I'm sure many of you recognize, the mayor of Max, if you will, has been here many years. LA based educator at institutions like USC, subject matter expert and curricular designer for truly all things Adobe and all things digital skills for organizations like General Assembly and Pearson Certiport, and the subject matter expert for Adobe Certified Professional exams.
And I think she's joined just about every Adobe community, both education community and Adobe community we have. She's an Adobe community expert and Adobe Education leader and Adobe Express Ambassador and many more. And she's also a joy to learn from. I got my my dose of Chana, yesterday seeing her teach illustrator, downstate downstairs. And if you haven't had an opportunity to learn from Chana before, she's remarkable. Thank you. And our fabulous education leader, Mala Sharma.
[Mala Sharma] And Chana has beautiful earrings. She has these amazing AI Photoshop and InDesign little icons here on her ears. I love it. [Brian Johnsrud] All right, so let's get started with, something I hope many of you have heard about, which is a competition called "The Edit." Nishy really created "The Edit" many years ago, and Adobe has been a sponsor of, edit challenges. So I was hoping you can tell us a little bit more about "The Edit." And in particular, there have been different themes for the student competitions over the years, some of which I think really touch on what we've been talking about today. Yeah. [Nishy Lall] So thank you, Brian, and thank you for inviting me to my first Max, it's wonderful to be here. Yeah. So "The Edit" was actually launched in 2020. So at a time when we were all trying to figure out what the world meant to us. And it's both Sky and an Adobe. Then NBC Academy does share, which is part of Project Hub. Comcast which is committed to, advancing digital equity. It is open to every middle and high school student, primary, secondary schools in the UK allows young people to create a 90-second video news report on key topics. And some of those, as you touched on, that's from, climate change to, mental, physical, financial, well-being. It allows students to use Adobe Express to prep, make and shape as we try to talk through those steps, as a sort of a lesson plan for teachers to use and then submit that for a competition.
Just in the spirit of sneak peeks, as you as you mentioned, and in my world, we call it breaking news. So in November this year, we are going to be actually going one step further and really kind of taking advantage of what Adobe Express can bring to the classroom. We're introducing fiction if we can think about some from the media industry and from my sort of, organizations with content makers. And we bring fact and fiction, so bring fiction into "The Edit" for the UK. is going to happen in November. And that's allowing students to create their own movie trailers, really allowing them to create the AI generated characters. And that's based on their very own stories. So as that kind of really allows them to kind of use their imagination and get truly creative as well. [Brian Johnsrud] That's amazing. I had the opportunity of, of, touring the kind of original in-person studio that they built, for students. And what was remarkable was kind of that moment students have when they're using something like Adobe Express, and suddenly they've created something that looks so professional, like they are now in the seat, and their imagination is like, wow, I could create stuff like this. "The Edit" kind of has that for, for new storytelling, where in just like a small activity, they're creating something like so professional. They really you can tell they say, oh, I could do this. I could be in the media industry or the news industry. [Nishy Lall] Yeah, absolutely. [Nishy Lall] So actually, one of our winners this year, from the US, was from Somerset Academy, and they created their news report on mental health, very topical, as we know, as educators and also from the young person's perspective. And what they were able to do is do that fun fact checking. So they use facts and they're able to use it on screen graphics using Adobe Express. They were able to create transitions. They were able to kind of do their voiceovers. And they created the 90-second report, which actually told the whole story. They actually interviewed their peers, their teachers, and brought to life a very important topic, through that news report. So one, they learned how to create that news report. They talked about very important topic. And then they also learned those important skills as well. So thinking about and working as teams thinking about sort of you know the media literacy skills, which is very important for any news organization in terms of kind of making sure that you are checking and double checking your facts. [Brian Johnsrud] Love it. One of the testaments to your success, I think, has been when the system gives you barriers or a pandemic throws you a curveball, you pivot and you innovate and you try something new. Chana, I think you've been doing that on campuses for quite a while. Because at places like USC, I mean, Adobe tools and creativity have sort of found their way into all the nooks and crannies of the campus. But you've had to do that kind of navigation. And being a champion, I wonder if you can share, any lessons, especially for folks who might be going back to their own schools or campuses and are trying to create that bigger impact? [Chana Messer] Yes. At USC, we were lucky enough in the Annenberg School of Communications to establish a special place called the Annenberg Digital Lounge, which enables students to come there five times a week from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. and basically sit there and create and then and do everything there, and then we support them with other educators that help them. So you can study, let's say, communication and marketing, but you need to do a presentation in Photoshop and you don't know how to do it yet. So you can come there to their lounge, and it's going to be people that will help you to do that. And I have like always have stories about certain students that come. So I had one student coming one day and she said to me, I'm studying communication. English is my second language. I have no idea how to kind of go into the market and doing something. What do you suggest? So I said to her, you know what? Start with our seminars because what we do is certification and special seminars there. So they come to one of my seminars and the other teachers' seminars, and she took Photoshop seminar and she got so excited. She never knew anything about creativity. She was not a creative person. First of all, I told her, "You are creative. Everybody is creative." "...No matter what you do, you have some creativity in you." That's it. I don't want to hear anything about. I'm not creative. I can't do that. I always tell my students, "You can do it... "...Doesn't matter how it looks, you can do it." We all are artists in our soul inside. And she took my Photoshop class and then she said, can I do the certification? And I said, of course you can do the certification. So she started from Photoshop and then she did Illustrator, and then she did "Premiere," and then she got an internship and then internship for a company. And then she starts, she sent me an email and she said, "Wow, I can't believe what what we did here..." "...Just from doing one seminar in this hub that we have there," and we starting to do videos about our centers. And Certiport is actually coming to do a whole story about us, and we hope that other school will do that because it just created and by the way, it created by person that now works for Adobe. It's Cortney Miller, and I have to mention her because she's the mentor, and she had this vision in her head that she wanted a safe space for students to create and not just walk away and say, I can't do that. Where are they going to ask? And and they don't want to look at tutorials. They want to be there and she succeeded. And we are there for like, I think 15 years. We have this digital place. I invite all of you to visit us. It's an amazing place. Amazing. [Brian Johnsrud] And you know that theme of if you want to make an impact, start with a space that's a creative space, but that's also just a safe space. [Chana Messer] A safe space, absolutely. And then the place looks really cool. It doesn't have like just chairs and tables. We have a sofa, we have windows. And the students like lay down in the window and they have curtains so they can sleep and pillows and it's all kind of like fun. And it's not like just sitting in a classroom. So they and it's the environment is so engaging and fun and it's open all day. So they come in, they come out to come in, out. And when instructions and seminars like I'm flying home Wednesday, I'll show up at L.A. At 9 p.m. and 11 a.m.. I'm doing a seminar on Photoshop. [Brian Johnsrud] Wow, I love it. Yeah. [Chana Messer] How to create a poster in Photoshop. Okay. [Brian Johnsrud] And you know, that model has really been an inspiration for a lot of our schools and campuses. Give a shout out to Holly at University of Utah. They have an amazing Adobe Creative Commons. The same thing of find a space where there's the tools and peers and mentors to just create. Yeah, remember that we're all creative.
[Mala Sharma] I'm going to steal your project. [Brian Johnsrud] All right. [Brian Johnsrud] You're sort of bridging K-12 and the US and the UK and higher ed, you've really been on a pretty remarkable listening tour the past few months of, school districts and campuses all around the world. So I'm wondering if you can share with us, are there kind of themes or threads that you're hearing from educators about AI and opportunity across, all the different schools and school leaders that you've been speaking with? [Mala Sharma] Yeah, I mean, just to build on what Chana said, you know, so I was recently in New York. I was in London, and met with...and in LA, met with various leaders both in the K-12 space and higher education. And there's a common theme. It's just so happened that the colleges and schools I went to was serving students who came from, you know, families where it was the first time that the student was going to college. So they came to college with a sense of, it's almost like an intimidation of how might they be successful. And what was top of mind for these, leaders was how do we enable these students to build a sense of self-worth? How do we give them a sense that they can put their idea across, get their pitch across with confidence? And, and a big part of the conversation was how AI can enable that. In fact, if you don't mind, I'm going to steal the story from the conversation you and I had yesterday where he tried to use Photoshop, and he said he sort of failed miserably. But it was because there wasn't a starting point. But today, with AI built into the tool, you have a starting point. What you need is a spark of an idea, and you can get started and create something and get the sense of immediate confidence. And so a lot of the conversations at... I was at Manchester Metropolitan, at CUNY, Fullerton, and the NYDOE...Same conversation about how do we simplify the process of creative learning with AI. What are those skills we can provide students? Is top of mind for all of these leaders, and I... And I think that, you know, whether it's the program like "Edit" that you're running Nishy, which is amazing. Chana the kind of places and spaces you're creating for students. We need to do this at scale, and technology allows us to do that. A product like Adobe Express with AI built in is a great starting point. So I'm excited for the future from this perspective. Yeah.
[Brian Johnsrud] Related to that theme of of AI and safety, Nishy as a media organization, trust and transparency are obviously key values that you want to teach students or exploring any careers as media professionals or news professionals. How are you ensuring that students learn those values, and how is technology helping them with that relationship that they need to have with their audiences? Trust and transparency and the media that they're creating? [Nishy Lall] Yeah. So, absolutely. Those media literacy skills are critical to, to our programs as a representation of our businesses. So thinking about sort of how you are responsible, I mean, young people are digital first, and I think that's the first step towards kind of understanding, you know, the, the beneficiary. So I always say the customer is a teacher for all of our programs because it's without those customers, those, you know, hooking those in and actually getting them to understand the benefits that we will reach those students. But the key thing is like, how do you take your students through a journey to make sure? Well, first, ensuring online safety, I think is absolutely key. And then kind of letting them understand and navigate their way through, information. And we all know the challenges around sort of, you know, AI and kind of like really understanding the sourcing of that information. You know, I know that I mentioned, you know, checking their facts, the reliability of those facts, all of that is built into the experiences. So understanding firstly, how does a news report come about? The first part of that is understanding the source of the story. So absolutely, it's integral to the programs that we run. And I think also thinking about those that want to enter the media industries, having those skills, is absolutely key to their success as well. [Brian Johnsrud] Absolutely. Yeah. [Brian Johnsrud] And any content creator, I mean, even on YouTube, I think the the relationship between content creators and their audiences and that same level of trust and transparency, I think it's it's becoming more and more important.
[Nishy Lall] Absolutely. Chana, as as one of our resident visionaries, I have a "dream... "...big" question for you. When you think about college and the notion of the degree and this new world that we're in, how might or how should college, college degrees, the college experience look different in 5 or 10 years? [Chana Messer] Well, 5 or 10 years from now, yes, maybe even sooner, a little bit. Who knows? I see it a little bit different, I see it, but you know, you Never know. That it not going to be like the standard four year college. Maybe it could be like a multidisciplinary college that people can choose the subject based on what they want to learn and then go...go into like kind of the groups or cohorts or stuff like learning different things. And then make it and go into the work area with it. So like let's say we're creating now curriculum at General Assembly, which is not a college, but maybe college students will be there and say, well, there's an interesting class in General Assembly that I want to do for three months, and that will give me maybe, a job later. They can go in and do that and then come back with the credit and go back to their stuff. So it's going to be a little bit more complicated, but not this standard for years that you're studying, let's say "Art History." You're going to go in and say I'm interested in certain things, and then you can start moving around because I feel like a student, even today when they're 18, I don't think they know what they want to do when 18. And the parents... kind of like in this. I mean, here I'm coming from a different kind of like society that I started college when I was 20. So I kind of know what I wanted. But here, when you were 18 or 17... ...and a half...Who's deciding it for you? Your parents? I go to this school because it is important and everybody knows about it. And and that's the student I get when I go. And in USC, they just tell me we don't know ...what we're here. I say, "Why are you studying communications? And they say, "Why? Because my father studied... "...Communications, and he said, a USC is a good school." And I'm thinking maybe in 4 or 5 years from now, between all the new skills and digital media and AI, they're going to kind of like, know who they are more and have the inspiration to do different things. [Nishy Lall] I love that. I totally agree with what you're saying, that if you think about AI and what it's going to allow educators to do is to create personalized journeys for their learners in a way that actually does not take away from creativity. And I think it actually will create more opportunity for students to be creative, because it's constructing a resource in a way that they firstly understand it. So it may well, reduce that for years to a two year program for them, because that's exactly what their endpoint is, because in that process they've already kind of sort of said, well, I want a bit of that and I want a bit of that, and I want a bit of that, and that's going to lead me to the career potentially, that I, that I want. But I also don't think as educators, we should be too worried about sort of making sure they know what they want after those four years. And I think that's probably the biggest, sort of challenge, that, that we have those in this education space is, is that do they know what they want? And actually sometimes it's okay not to because it is a journey. [Chana Messer]Yeah, it is a journey. [Chana Messer] And sometimes I tell them it is okay to change your mind, too. It is okay to start in Communication and then you want to do Digital Media. And I have students in Communication... Most of my students are communication and marketing. They're not designers. They have students now. They want to be designers ...all of a sudden they say, well, I would like to be like a graphic designer so I can send them to the other discipline and just do that and not just decide to be in communication. I have a lot of student that's so interested after the classes that we give them in graphic design, in digital media, in editing and creating movies and all kind of stuff, and they're all getting internship in that. So which is I think it's amazing not to like put them in a box. Yeah. Just let them let them be free. [Mala Sharma] Just to build on What Chana said, you know, a couple of conversations I've had recently, there's a lot of interesting thinking. In fact, I think it was at Goldsmiths in, in London, where they've built a program that's called the Connected Curriculum Program. And think of it as really as pulling together students from different disciplines into a single course. So you have, you know, students from humanities, from science, psychology. And philosophy, all together in a single cohort. And they're given, basically a real life problem to go solve as part of the first semester and what that's doing for them. And this is what my vision of a future college is is that you're not really tied to your discipline. What you're tied to is solving a real life problem with people from different disciplines, and you're learning critical skills that are required at work. So facts will be at your fingertips, right? The bots will be able to answer the question that amazing research some bots will do for us, right? But what we need these kids to graduate with is the ability to solve problems through discussion to abstract thinking, conversation, debate.
So the importance of critical thinking and collaboration and communication is so significant. So this idea of, you know, letting them come in with whatever mindset they have, but allowing them to find sort of their, their future careers. And it doesn't matter what they choose, but if they cannot collaborate effectively with people that are not of the same discipline as them, or they cannot lead that group to come up with what the solution for the problem that was presented to them, they're going to struggle. And that is really, I think, the opportunity that educators, colleges, schools need to provide. ...to build these skills inherently. Absolutely. Yeah. [Brian Johnsrud] Thank you all for this conversation and for sharing more about the incredible work that you do. Please join me in a round of applause for our fantastic panelists. [Applause]
