Preparing students for fast-paced careers

When Full Sail University was founded in 1979, there were few places for creative young people to study the music industry. Students could learn performance at a musical conservatory or study business at university, but there were no schools that would train students’ ears, teach them the science behind audio engineering, and give them hands on experience in a sound booth.

Full Sail University changed the paradigm for entertainment education. Today, Full Sail offers associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees through 89 programs focused on the world of entertainment, media, arts, and technology. Students come to Full Sail to become cinematographers, mobile app designers, computer animators, or sportscasters. Full Sail graduates are making waves every day in the entertainment industry, earning major industry awards including Academy Awards, Emmys, and Grammys.

Unlike typical colleges and universities, Full Sail concentrates on providing students with highly relevant learning experiences that mirror the challenges they will face in their chosen industries. Classes are immersive and fast paced with a focus on collaboration and client projects. Rather than taking multiple classes over a semester, students focus on one or two courses each month. Not only does the monthly class schedule help students finish their degrees faster, but it means that students can start their degree in any month instead of waiting months for a semester to begin.

“Technology is essential to the long-term career success for each of our graduates, whether they’re creating a video game for next-gen devices, filming a movie on the latest camera, or working with cutting-edge audio software to clean up a track,” says Scott Dansby, Director of Industry Relations at Full Sail University. “We need to teach our students to work with the latest technologies available today and prepare them to adapt to all of the new technologies that they will be exposed to throughout their careers.”

****With a need for technology that moves at the speed of the entertainment and media industries, Full Sail introduced Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise into its classrooms. Through an Adobe Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA), Adobe Creative Cloud apps are available to faculty and staff, as well as most students across a variety of programs.

“Working with Adobe Creative Cloud, students can access brand-new applications and updates as soon as they’re released,” says Dansby. “We’re exposing students to the very latest Adobe technologies and preparing students for fast-paced careers in the entertainment industry.”

Teaching mobile-first design

One Creative Cloud app that has made a big splash at Full Sail is Adobe XD, Adobe’s collaborative design and prototyping app. For modern designers, understanding how to design websites, apps, and games for mobile devices is an essential career skill. In fact, as mobile usage continues to grow and overtake desktop usage, many designers are switching to mobile-first designs.

Eric Rosenfeld is program director for the Graphic Design and the Digital Arts & Design degree programs. According to Rosenfeld, teaching mobile-first design techniques was traditionally quite difficult. Students needed to understand HTML, CSS, website design, and responsive techniques before moving on to the more complicated world of mobile design.

“With Adobe XD, design students can immediately start prototyping designs for different screen sizes,” says Rosenfeld. “We can quickly move into conversations about branding, marketing, and usability for mobile screens without getting bogged down in learning a completely new technology.”

Design students work with Adobe Creative Cloud apps, such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, every day. Students become very familiar with Adobe workflows, making it easy for them to start using Adobe XD. They can build their first prototypes using templates and default interface elements that adjust responsively to different screen sizes, giving them good examples of how elements can be designed to scale and change. After creating a working prototype, students can even view the results live on their smartphones.

Using Adobe XD helps design students explore their ideas for websites and apps without needing to learn new technical and coding skills. One student had an idea for a potty-training app that would get both parents and children involved in the potty-training process. The child’s app experience would involve a simple interface, bright colors, and fun visuals to “reward” children for using the potty. The parent’s app experience would focus more on charts and calendars to visually track a child’s progress.

The student used Adobe XD to design and prototype the two app experiences. Because the student didn’t need to worry about programming and development, she could focus energy on the design and have a more complete picture of her vision before talking to developers.

Streamlining app development with fast prototyping

The fast and easy prototyping process doesn’t just benefit designers with little background or interest in programming. Josh Donlan, program director for the Mobile Development and the Web Design and Development degrees, uses Adobe XD in the classroom to help developers work with designers, create their own designs, and quickly prototype ideas.

Unlike typical computer science or programming degrees, Full Sail trains developers to put the focus on the human needs of an app, website, or piece of software. Developers need to understand how users will work with the design and how user needs will affect development issues such as feature scoping.

Working with Adobe XD, developers can quickly create a working prototype for their project. They can use templates to create the design, or work side-by-side with a designer using familiar Adobe workflows.

“The amount of programming involved in a traditional wireframe was significant, so a lot of people just resorted to drawing the whole thing out on paper,” says Donlan. “With Adobe XD, developers can create a clickable prototype in hours or even minutes. This streamlines approvals so that developers can work on the code with confidence that the client understands how the website or app will function.”

Students use Adobe XD as a prominent part of their capstone portfolio sequence. Modeled after a real-world client experience, development students must pitch their software or app, demonstrate features, and prototype the application. Adobe XD helps students solidify their ideas so that they can spend as much time as possible developing high-quality applications for their portfolios. Development students gain a greater understanding of how design affects the projects they develop and how to better interact with clients with highly understandable prototypes, which makes them more marketable.

Keeping all users on the same software with ease

Full Sail easily manages thousands of Adobe Creative Cloud licenses using Named User Licensing through the Adobe Admin Console. Previously, administrators needed to manage thousands of separate serial numbers. They would hand out software disks to faculty or students and oversee any updates or upgrades. When new versions of Adobe software were released, new students would get the latest versions while older students would often remain on prior versions.

With Adobe Creative Cloud and Named User Licensing, new faculty, staff, and students are automatically assigned necessary licenses. Users receive an email invitation to Adobe Creative Cloud, set up an account, and start downloading software. All installation and updates are handled by users themselves.

“One of the biggest benefits of working with Adobe Creative Cloud is that we can keep everyone on the same version,” says Dansby. “For the classroom, this means that we don’t have to worry about supporting backdated versions. We can concentrate on delivering cutting-edge curriculum that will prepare students to be lifelong learners of technology throughout their careers.”

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