All Penn State students — from University Park to Brandywine to the most remote corners of the World Campus — will have access to the entire suite of Adobe Creative Cloud apps starting Monday, September 18. The 20 apps include desktop and mobile compatible software for basic photo-editing, high-powered 360-degree video-creation, and simple, yet savvy e-portfolio design tools.

To formally kick off the new program, the Adobe Rollout Team will “take over the HUB” on September 18 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to register students and conduct demos of the various software. Students don’t have to attend the event to download the Creative Cloud. They can do so remotely at this link. Adobe Success Manager Kirsten Nagel warned that downloading it while connected to WiFi might take a while, especially on campus next week, when the university’s bandwidth could potentially be exhausted from all the downloads.

The implementation of “software and services for creative professionals” comes as the Teaching and Learning with Technology team’s latest initiative to prepare students for 21st-century careers, where digital media continues to increasingly drive the hiring process, business, and so many other career ventures every day.

Accordingly, the team’s aim with this latest project is to build students’ digital fluency with the most innovative and useful technology, coming on the heels of past implementations such as the library’s one-button studios.

“It’s one thing to know how to use Photoshop,” Teaching and Learning with Technology senior director Jennifer Sparrow said Monday night at the program’s roll-out media event. “It’s another thing to know how to use it in a way that allows you to create something that is new and different for your own educational experience.”

Like the one-button studios, the various Adobe apps are intended to be integrated into existing courses, with the help of instructional designers. And the apps aren’t just for fun or for Communications and Graphic Design classes. Since all students will enter the modern, competitive, more results-driven than ever job market in just a few short years, the team envisions all majors being able to use the software, whether it be statistics students illustrating data with their own infographics or nutritional science students building websites as a project on spreading findings.

In addition to classroom instruction, Sparrow recommends watching videos on Lynda.psu.edu, another perquisite for students where they can learn how to do literally anything.

The crown jewels of the suite are Premiere Pro, a professional-grade (as the name would imply) video editor that can create 360-degree and 3D videos, virtual reality simulations, and augmented reality productions, and Adobe Character Animator, which was used to make a live episode of The Simpsons in 2016. A game-changer for the technologically challenged is Adobe Capture, which is essentially a simplified, web-based version of Illustrator that was noted as being perfect for creating memes.

Some other interesting features include access to a vastly growing social network (Behance) and digital portfolio for sharing Adobe-created content and cloud compatibility where multiple users can access the same projects at the same time from different locations and store various colors and templates across programs to maintain their workflows.

The full platform of software includes:

Photoshop
Photoshop Fix
InDesign
Illustrator
Illustrator Draw
Character Animator
Adobe Premiere Clip
Lightroom
Lightroom for Mobile
Adobe Stock
Typekit
Experience Design
Dreamweaver
Adobe Muse
Premiere Pro
Audition
Adobe Story CC
After Effects
Behance
Adobe Portfolio