Access to Creative Tools Prepares Students for the Future

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.