Adobe gives students free at-home Creative Cloud access during Covid-19 crisis

The past couple of weeks have seen universities and educators around the world changing up their teaching methods to remote learning and online courses in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many students now find themselves stuck at home, trying to continue their work on laptops and joining seminars over video calls.

In light of all this, Adobe has announced a series of measures to try to help educational institutions get through this time with minimal disruption. First it is giving students greater access to Adobe Creative Cloud desktop apps to make distance learning easier, as campuses close and courses move online. These apps include the most popular ones for designers, including InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

In a statement, the creative technology company said: “We’re giving our higher education and K-12 [publicly supported schools] institutional customers globally – who currently make Creative Cloud apps available to students who login through on-campus labs – the ability to request temporary ‘at-home’ access for their students and educators.” This measure will be in place until the end of May, 2020 at no additional cost, the statement continued.

It’s worth saying that only school administrators can request this extra access via an application form (which can be found here). However, if you’re a student and your art school or university doesn’t seem to be aware of the offer and you need Creative Cloud access in order to continue working, then it would be worth getting in touch with your administrators.

As many of you will have surmised from the proliferation of Twitter threads in recent days written by educators seeking and giving advice on how to teach remotely, the current situation also represents uncharted waters for many professors and tutors. For any educators out there looking for tips and recommendations on how to deliver engaging and inspiring lessons remotely, Adobe has also shared some resources gleaned from its community of creative educators. These suggestions, including best practices and new ideas for online teaching methods, can be found here.

It’s an incredibly tough time for the world, not least the creative community – but it’s encouraging to see the goodwill and supportive environment extending from local communities and groups right up to multinational companies. In order to get through this time, the creative community and individuals will need to continue to band together and share ideas for how to weather the storm. Over the coming days and weeks, we at It’s Nice That will be covering more stories like this of how individuals and companies are coping with the current crisis.