SJSU Leads Digital Literacy as Adobe Center of Excellence

Since 2025, the CSU + Adobe for All Initiative has given all students, faculty and staff across the CSU system free access to innovative tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Express.

As part of the initiative, SJSU established the Adobe Center of Excellence (ACE) , which serves as a digital hub, providing training and resources to enhance productivity, creativity and AI fluency.

Last spring, ACE launched with a series of meetings and a digital literacy summit where representatives from all of the CSU campuses came together to discuss implementation.

Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Ryan Skinnell serves as co-director of ACE. He is also chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature and director of First-Year Writing Programs.

"The digital hub is a place where anybody can come and access digital literacy materials including assignments, readings and assessments," says Skinnell. "We also do one-on-one consultations to talk about implementation in different departments."

Skinnell has witnessed firsthand what happens when students are given different tools to enhance and deepen their learning.

"We know from research that one way students learn is to transfer their learning and their writing, and be able to turn it into digital slides or an infographic. They have to think about different contexts and different audiences," says Skinnell.

A few years ago, Adobe gave SJSU a grant to support digital literacy in first-year writing classes. In fall 2024, with help from the Adobe grant, the first digital literacy showcase was launched , giving students the opportunity to showcase their interactive projects and multimedia work on both laptops and iPads. The event was such a success that it has been happening every semester since.

"The showcase is visual and celebratory in a way that Adobe found compelling," says Skinnell.

After the initial showcase, Adobe invited Skinnell and other members of the program to participate in the early stages of a systemwide partnership between the CSU and Adobe.

"With this designation as an Adobe Center of Excellence, we've formally become a place people look to for expertise, experience and guidance around digital literacy," says Skinnell. "This has long been the case since we're in Silicon Valley. But this puts a kind of formality behind it."

Leading the Initiative

Several SJSU faculty and university leaders are involved in leading the ACE initiative. Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Success Friederike Bruehoefener is one of them. For Bruehoefener, ACE offers faculty another way to engage in professional development and deepening the learning process for students.

"In general, if we think about creativity literacy of any kind, helping faculty to develop and think about digital literacy and creativity - it's important for faculty's professional and career growth," says Bruehoefener. "Also, in various fields, [it's important] to explore certain approaches to how we think about and teach digital literacy. It's an opportunity to cross interdisciplinary boundaries; an opportunity to engage."

Bruehoefener also mentioned the relevance of digital tools to the professional lives and careers of students.

"One of the things that also comes to mind are the different ways that digital tools of any kind might also allow students to express themselves," she says. "It brings in accessibility. It adds a rich opportunity for students to create assignments and engage in materials that they encounter in classes, as well as challenges and problems they might need to address."

As SJSU continues to lead in digital literacy and creativity, Bruehoefener believes that there will be more opportunities for faculty to be engaged in collaboration.

Karen Wang, co-director of ACE, is an assistant professor of instructional design and technology at SJSU. Her research is centered around examining emerging tools in education, specifically in STEM.

"I spend a lot of time thinking about the tools used in education," says Wang. "So this co-director role feels like a fun challenge to explore how education is being impacted by the latest wave of technologies, and to ask ourselves how we can leverage digital tools to enhance teaching and learning beyond simply building more powerful tools. It's wonderful to have a partner like Adobe and the opportunity to explore how its industry-leading creative tools can be meaningfully integrated into college instruction across disciplines to support student success. When our students succeed, the impact on the community is that much more powerful."

When generative AI tools first became available to the public, Wang remembers this excitement in the education community around building AI-powered tools and solving many of the issues that plagued the field of education. At the time, Wang was a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University, where she began designing and evaluating large language model (LLM)-based tutors to support student problem-solving in introductory STEM courses.

"But through that work, I'm convinced that beyond designing better tools, we need to empower students to use the tools in ways that don't shortcut their learning," says Wang. "So there's the tech side and there's also the teaching and instructional design side. And I think we need both for these tools to be a meaningful, positive, effective experience rather than being detrimental to student learning."

Since ACE launched in spring 2026, Wang has been facilitating a weekly session that includes faculty leads from several SJSU colleges. During the sessions, the faculty leads brainstorm ways to meaningfully incorporate digital tools into course activities and assignments, explore relevant research on teaching and learning, work alongside one another to develop materials, and review each other's work to offer feedback and refine the activities. The resulting activities can be adapted across disciplines and used at different points in the semester, giving students opportunities to engage with course content, express their learning creatively and build confidence using digital tools.

The digital Adobe hub lives in Canvas, the CSU's learning management system, and is available to not only the SJSU community, but also faculty and students across the CSU system.

For Wang, the hub is about focusing on faculty as the agent of change.

"We're trying to inspire faculty to incorporate creative assignments in their courses to empower students to leverage digital tools to increase their sense of belonging and self-efficacy, and also give them reflective opportunities in learning," says Wang. "We want students to do more than learn how to use a particular tool, but to use these tools so they can express themselves, showcase their learning and become more confident and adaptable as they navigate a rapidly changing world."