The University of California system’s more than 500,000 students and faculty across 10 campuses will have access next year to a suite of design software from Australian technology company Canva, including its AI-driven offerings that let students generate images from text prompts.
The company’s software, already in use on some UC campuses and at least one San Francisco Unified School District class, is akin to a digital canvas with an artificial intelligence plug-in that lets users create visual content such as photos and videos — as well as presentations, reports and other media — by describing them in writing.
“Our world today is a visual one. We communicate through presentations, reports and social media,” said Van Williams, chief information officer for the University of California, in a statement. “Canva’s ease of use and ability to make complex things simple has made it a widely used tool by our students and staff.”
A UC spokesperson said in an email that numerous faculty, departments, student groups and other campus organizations already use the Canva technology.
But the patchwork approach across the system's 10 campuses made it hard to oversee the use of the tools properly, the statement from spokesperson Heather Hansen said. So UC decided to buy licenses to the software outright, “to capture more value from our existing relationship and integrate this service into system-wide standards,” Hansen said.
The software is now employed at UC San Diego and UC Davis, and Canva estimates it has around 150,000 users across the UC system.
Hansen said the total anticipated cost to the UC system for the software will be less than $1 million annually. The first-year cost also includes 300,000 free licenses for UC students.
Jason Wilmot, Canva’s head of education products, said that the first campuses will get access to the software in January and that customers will be able to access it using single sign-on through their university email addresses. He said the details of where it will be implemented first are under discussion.
He said each campus will have its own license for the software.
The technology is “going to be used in a variety of classroom applications,” as well as by university alumni and marketing departments, athletics departments, students groups and others to create visual and promotional content, Wilmot said.
The text-to-video feature includes the ability to create a movie from a written prompt, as well as to alter and refine it for a specific project, Wilmot said.
He previously told the Chronicle that Canva’s education tools were in use by 5,000 school districts, with 40 million active monthly users. Those K-12 tools, which include similar technology, such as AI video and image creation from text prompts, are offered free of charge.
The SFUSD students at Balboa High School have used Canva’s tools to help ideate and storyboard scripts they wrote and will eventually make into short films by piecing together images the software generates based on their text prompts.
Students learn to refine their prompts to coax the image they want out of the AI, and then mix and resize them on a digital canvas to create a storyboard page.
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