Overview
In winter 2020 and spring 2021, I was actively seeking faculty partners to develop and launch programming to bolster faculty digital fluency. It was a difficult time because of COVID-19 and the entire community still 100% work-from-home. But it was part of my role, to do my part on the academic side to drive forward the Adobe Creative Campus partnership and find ways to get faculty, staff, and students using Adobe tools.
The GW-Adobe Science Education Initiative was a program created during late spring to summer 2021 with the aim of upskilling faculty in the use of Adobe Creative Cloud tools to do scientific investigation and beautifully report results. The program was envisioned by myself and Sylvain Guiriec, Ph.D., an Astrophysicist at GWU. We pitched the idea to Adobe for grant support and were successfully awarded $25,000 USD. With my part of the funds, I recruited faculty with an interest in transforming their digital skills and teaching to work with my team of Multimedia Producers and adjacent Instructional Designers to create new digital learning activities with Adobe Creative Cloud tools at the center. As a reward I offered a $500 USD stipend.
The Pitch
The stated purpose of the initiative was to elevate scientific discovery and dissemination through developing faculty and empowering students with the technical know-how and the design thinking mindset to apply and take full advantage of the Adobe Creative Cloud. We aimed to:
- promote science and new technologies with creative and engaging projects;
- teach professional presentation skills for academic and professional projects;
- apply image and video editing skills for modern projects in science and astronomy; and
- build faculty capacity in image and video processing mastery for teaching, research and scientific dissemination.
Taking action
The GW-Adobe SEI ran on two fronts. One was out of the Physics department and the other was with my team in the central library. We would both inform the community about the opportunity and recruit faculty to join; meet with faculty one-on-one to discuss their course, content, and idea; invite them to meet with us as the program managers; identify staff who could help; and kick-off the project work. Then over 2-3 months, participating faculty working with support staff would learn how to use Adobe tools to create a new science lesson and have artifacts to support its implementation.
Impact
The program garnered strong faculty attention and during 2022 it produced 4 new STEM lessons and learning activities infused with Adobe Creative Cloud. The participating faculty grew significantly in their ability to implement Adobe tools to do science and they became solid partners as well as advocates. We faced headwinds however with a general digital burnout among faculty from their online teaching experience during the pandemic. And ultimately the program dissolved due to the university opting to not renew the Adobe Creative Campus partnershp and the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence at the end of 2022.