Preparing Students for the Digital Future

The ability to clearly communicate information and ideas is essential to any career, whether someone is explaining scientific findings at a conference, creating internal workflow guidelines, or trying to close a sale. And in the modern world, the ability to communicate through digital mediums is more important than ever.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) recognizes the importance of preparing students for successful careers by improving their digital literacy. This doesn’t just refer to knowing how to crop photos or write code. For UNC-Chapel Hill, digital literacy is about being able to solve problems, think critically, and learn how to best engage with audiences in a digital era.

UNC-Chapel Hill partnered with Adobe to provide Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise licenses to students and faculty. “Adobe is a standard across industries, and Adobe Creative Cloud complements our curriculum so we can promote digital literacy across disciplines at UNC,” says Chris Kielt, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Every student receives access to Adobe Creative Cloud, encouraging them to develop their own websites, design flyers for campus events, or create engaging class presentations. Since students can work with Creative Cloud apps anywhere, they can experiment, solve problems, and build skills that will serve them in their future careers.

One health humanities student, Izzy Pinheiro, became interested in how digital communications can help share stories about health and healing. She created a multimedia website using Adobe Spark to tell the story of Syrian refugees in Jordan and how this humanitarian crisis has affected healthcare for refugees, as well as Jordanian clinicians and citizens. Adobe Spark made it easy for Pinheiro to bring together photos, video clips, text, and animation to tell her story quickly and effectively.

Working with Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise also improves the IT experience for UNC-Chapel Hill. Named User Deployment ties licenses to usernames, so that when students graduate, their software access is automatically restricted. The Adobe Admin Console also allows IT teams to distribute responsibilities across departments and reduce administrative overhead.

“The digital literacy initiative at UNC has been a true partnership with Adobe,” says Kielt. “We’re producing graduates who will have the digital literacy skills that are expected by the marketplace. That will result in a highly satisfying outcome for our future and for the future of our students.” Discover more here.