Few will disagree that graduates need to acquire or develop skills during their study. At a high level, there’s also a surprising degree of consensus on what sorts of skills are valuable; these tend to cluster around C words such as collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking.
The arrival of AI hasn’t changed that; if anything, it’s only intensified the imperative to ensure graduates are able to demonstrate broad-based skills and apply them in industry.
As a consequence, graduate attributes frameworks, employability strategies, and skills agendas have become a fixture of institutional planning. The challenge is the gap between a strategy that names the skills students need and a curriculum that builds them. The issues are both conceptual and practical. Educators have to work out what it means, in disciplinary terms, to develop skills, and this approach is not well established in some subjects and disciplinary cultures. Then those involved in programme design need to identify opportunities for skills development within the curriculum, shape learning activities and resources to support that development, and assess students’ application of those skills in practice.
There’s no shortage of great models and frameworks, nor of individual enthusiasts who are championing innovation in their areas. But to scale and embed skills across an institution takes hard work and coordinated effort. A senior team can set a direction, but this only translates into a meaningful graduate attribute when it is designed into a module, taught by an academic who is confident in the approach and assessed in a way students recognise. Move too far top-down, and you will get a checklist list of attributes that no one owns. Rely purely on individual enthusiasts, and you will get pockets of brilliant practice that don’t translate across disciplinary contexts.
The Adobe Creative Campus network in the UK brings together multiple institutions with a shared aim: to realise strategic goals for student engagement and success through embedding use of Adobe tools in curricula. Beginning in 2020 with the first European Creative Campus, Teesside University, the network has grown to more than 20 institutions. As we’ve worked alongside colleagues who are seeking to make change happen, we keep hearing the same challenge: They want to develop their own distinctive approach, but they also want a cheat sheet with some use cases, examples, and ideas they can apply and build out from.
The context is pragmatic: when resources are tight, innovation can be amplified by good ideas from elsewhere, reconfigured for a different environment. And when you are asking faculty to change what they do, it’s essential to take account of the context in which most faculty are operating: high workloads, pressure on recruitment, and a fast-changing academic landscape, thanks to AI.
So to respond to this challenge, Adobe has been reflecting on the spaces between large-scale frameworks and individual practitioners, and the kinds of resources that can support the development of practice in that space. We’ve concluded that there needs to be a level of disciplinary focus and we’ve started with business schools, a context in which employability and value-add are always front and centre, and where the closeness to industry means that faculty are typically used to adapting curricula in light of business needs.
Aston’s power skills – lens, not leaflet
As a worked example, at Aston University, Deputy Dean Education: Student Experience and Success, Chris Umfreville is working through how the university’s Power Skills framework can be manifested and made authentic in curricula, working with the university’s careers and placements team. In a context where employability is part of the university’s heritage and founding mission, power skills are, in Chris’s words, a way of capturing a “vision for the idea of needing to prepare students for an ever-changing and uncertain future.”
The four power skills – AI and digital, innovation and entrepreneurship, inclusive leadership, and environmental sustainability – are intended to be “specific enough to have value but broad enough to allow for interpretation and application,” as Chris explains. All require a degree of technical knowledge and proficiency in addition to durable skills and the contextual awareness that employers value. But there is still plenty of room for interpretation and application within different disciplines.
Rather than either leaving that interpretation entirely up to individuals or enforcing a particular model, Aston has adopted a hybrid approach. Each of the power skills is designed as a five-hour stackable module, built with asynchronous online content using Adobe tools, and combining academic domain insight and industry expertise. But the deployment can vary. In some disciplines, where it makes sense to do so, a standalone power skills module as part of the overall programme. In others, power skills content is embedded within relevant modules, areas of study, or key moments in programmes.
For example, the business school chose to integrate the AI and digital module into Welcome Week. “That was a useful approach because it allowed us to showcase the VLE in ways that students would engage with, to wrap around an activity with students to allow for community and transition support, and at the same time to address the elephant in the room of AI use without terrifying the students or shouting at them about academic integrity,” says Chris. The session used generated AI images to demonstrate the benefits and limitations of AI, and highlight the need to apply a critical lens to written outputs.
During reading week, the school ran a voluntary environmental challenge, with students working in groups to create an environmental campaign (eg the promotion of green space in Birmingham) using Adobe tools, and working towards the award of an Adobe microcredential. The activity was designed to complement students completing the environmental sustainability Power Skill, providing an opportunity to apply the content in a local context, expanding their digital capabilities and gain recognition in the process.
While some staff are already attuned to these skills and how they show up in curricula, that is not true of everyone. “We don’t want to create more work for colleagues,” says Chris. “The module approach is useful, because we’re not asking all academic staff to be expert in these skills. Instead, we’re asking for identification of where there is alignment. You don’t need to understand everything Adobe does and teach it to students, for example, but we need you to know it exists and its potential uses, then be prepared to signpost to students and let them explore. That way, we can learn from them.”
From building the core content, the goal is to iterate and continue to embed and evolve until the Power Skills framework brings about the shift from short term strategic agenda to business as usual. The change this represents for student experience is subtle but significant. Aston was already strong on employability, but that work was, Chris says, “very output driven” and focused on CVs, self-presentation, and the procedural steps of applying for a job. Power skills content reframes the goal from performance to substance, with skills showing up as “a quality of you rather than something you perform.” It is a response to a real erosion, too. The durable skills students once absorbed through campus life and academic experience now develop less reliably, as part-time work, larger cohorts, and less time on campus eat into informal learning opportunities.
From practice to playbook
Aston is one case and one approach, but there are others across the Adobe Creative Campus network that we are useful to showcase and learn from. That’s the gap the Adobe business school guide, Driving Success in Business Schools, is designed to fill.
We quickly discarded broad-brush frameworks as too generic. Instead, we worked directly with specific institutions, auditing what they were doing. Some had leaders developing top-down approaches, and others had individual academics following their own curiosity. We were able to translate these authentic and specific use cases into broad frameworks that can support a wide range of other institutions.
UWE Bristol, was preparing to launch a new spine module for all 1000 students from across the business school. We explored how Adobe Express could support defined learning activities such as goal setting and planning, working with the digital team to create templates and with faculty to develop case studies. At Cardiff Metropolitan University, we worked from the bottom up, with highly engaged lecturers to create a hub for individual academics to showcase and share their ideas, building a “proof of concept” space that caught the attention of heads of department. And at Manchester Metropolitan University, we worked with course cohorts of different sizes to play-test activities like creating a living CV or switching from a presentation assessment to a multimedia pitch.
The guide includes all these case studies, along with templates to help you get started, Adobe Express Learning Kits to share with faculty, and inspiration for practical activities.
A key piece of learning from this exercise was that every stakeholder is essential in making change. Academics understand the students, the curriculum, and the workflows. Leadership provides strategy, permission, resources, and celebration. And the fuel that makes it all happen tends to be the digital learning and learning technology teams, who accelerate adoption by giving nervous academics safety nets and scaffolding to try something different.
In the past, we’ve seen that the gap between digital consumption and digital production hasn’t always been sufficiently visible, especially in pedagogy. Multimodal work asks us to think in different ways, engaging complex mental processes that synchronise image, text, and sound to make meaning. Just because you’ve seen a TV programme or listened to a podcast doesn’t mean you know how to make a good video or audio output and these complex communication approaches are becoming increasingly important in the workplace.
Digital poverty can combine with low academic confidence to discourage students from trying something if they’re not sure they will be successful. Yet getting comfortable with trying and failing is a key skill in itself. Across the board, the lecturers and digital learning teams I worked with were strong advocates for introducing these things in low-stakes, playful ways before they ever count towards an assessment, helping students take ownership of a project and build their confidence.
The guide won’t build anyone’s curriculum for them. But for institutions staring at the gap between a skills strategy and a lecture theatre, it offers something more useful than another framework: a map of the ideas, the stakeholders, and a springboard to turn ambition into practice.
This article is published as part of a partnership with Adobe. You can download Driving Success in Business Schools: Integrating Multimodal Learning in Curriculum here.
