Write Your Story First: How Tulane University Used Adobe Express and Firefly to Welcome Students Before Move-in Day
- Aug 27
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 28
For most incoming students, the story of their time at a university begins months before the first day of school. It starts over a long summer of paperwork, packing lists, and a slowly building question: Who am I going to be when I get there?
Research on student success consistently points to the same lesson: The earlier students feel connected to a campus, the more likely they are to persist, engage, and thrive. But most of that early runway, the months between acceptance letter and move-in day, is spent on to-do lists, not reflection. Orientation modules cover logistics. Rarely does anyone ask students to reflect on their personal stories.
At Tulane University, the Innovative Learning Center decided to use that runway differently. Working with Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly, the team built two colorfully named projects, Hullabaloo Hello! and the Second Line Umbrella, that turn orientation and the first-year seminar into an exercise in storytelling. Faculty interested in implementing a similar approach can explore the Educator Resource Kit for practical guidance and ready-to-use resources.
In a recent Adobe Academic Innovation Café session, Mike Griffith, Director of the Innovative Learning Center at Tulane, and Bobby Garner-Coffee, Instructional Technology Lead, joined us to share how the project came together and the impact it’s had for more than a thousand incoming students
Introducing Hullabaloo Hello!
Rather than wait until students set foot on campus, Tulane's Innovative Learning Center wanted new students to start building a connection to the university and getting comfortable with its digital tools before the fall semester began.
The result was Hullabaloo Hello!, an optional badge project completed asynchronously online during the summer as part of new-student orientation. Framed as a low-stakes creative exercise rather than a graded assignment, it asked students to design a personal badge using Adobe Express and Firefly. Students were given:
The following prompt to get started, so they didn’t have to stare at a blank page: “Think of a few phrases or key words that capture the elements of your vision for your academic journey”
A template in which to generate an image with AI, beginning with a single click and a custom prompt
Fields in the template they could fill in with their names and hometowns
“I like to say that innovation is baked into our mission.” — Garner-Coffee, describing Tulane's approach to continuously expanding its tech stack and digital literacy strategy.
Scaffolding a low-stakes first step
The badge itself lived inside a Making Connections module in Tulane's Canvas LMS, with no due date and no grade attached. That was deliberate. By the time students reached their first real assignment in the fall, many had already logged into Canvas, activated their Adobe ID, and used Firefly once — all without the pressure of a real deadline.
The team also stocked the module with troubleshooting resources for logging in or using the Adobe tools. For many students, it was their first experience with Adobe Express and Firefly.
Building belonging at scale
The badge project launched to Tulane's roughly 1,800 incoming first-year students in June. For the first couple weeks, submissions trickled in slowly, but soon there were more than 1,100 badges submitted - a 60% response rate.
"We were just overwhelmed," Garner-Coffee said. "It was just exciting to see the number of responses that we received."
The badges took on a life of their own. Without originally planning to, the team displayed a collage of student badges onscreen during in-person orientation, behind the university president and deans and in front of students and their families. Some students who completed Hullabaloo Hello! over the summer later turned up at an August workshop called Digital Tools to Make College Click, specifically because of the positive experience they'd had with the badge project.
For institutions considering a similar approach, Tulane's experience offers a few practical lessons:
Start before students arrive. Use the gap between acceptance and move-in day, not just the first week of class, to build connections.
Keep the first step low-stakes. No grade and no due date means students will engage on their own terms, which can lead to a higher participation rate.
Let one experience lead to the next. A light, accessible first project builds momentum and familiarity. A deeper, more reflective project can build on that foundation.
The Second Line Umbrella: A story that grows with the student
That deeper project for Tulane is the Second Line Umbrella, a portfolio assignment built for students in the TIDES first-year seminar courses. TIDES courses bring together small groups of students and faculty to explore academics, culture, and the city of New Orleans.
The name comes from New Orleans' second line tradition. "The second line umbrella is sort of a deep part of New Orleans culture in general," Griffith explained. Social aid and pleasure clubs historically decorated umbrellas for parades and fundraisers, turning them into an expression of a group's own story. "They’ve become sort of a universal New Orleans thing," Griffith said of the umbrellas, which are visible at Saints games and Tulane's own commencement ceremony. "Part of the pulse of the city as a whole."
In the Adobe Express template, each panel of the umbrella becomes part of a student's personal narrative: their contact information, a personal story, and images they choose themselves. Unlike the badge project, it's designed explicitly to keep growing. "This was meant to be a living story," Griffith said, "something that can grow and evolve during the student's journey. They might start out with the assignment in that first-year seminar, but that's not where it has to end."
To get faculty on board, the Innovative Learning Center team hosted a lunch-and-learn session, bringing in Adobe to help brainstorm ideas before turning the Second Line Umbrella into a ready-to-copy Canvas assignment that any TIDES instructor could add to their course.
What's next for Tulane
The badge and portfolio projects have inspired further collaborations. Partnering with Tulane's library media team, the Innovative Learning Center launched Express Yourself: Album Art for Your Story. An album cover design competition tied to a library listening event, Express Yourself involved handing students a blank Firefly template with no prompt at all, a deliberate contrast to the structure built into Hullabaloo Hello! The team has also folded the Adobe Express module library directly into Canvas, giving faculty ready-made content to draw on for their own assignments.
Looking ahead, the team wants to capture the actual Firefly prompts students use in Hullabaloo Hello! to better understand how their creative choices evolve. They also want to launch the Second Line Umbrella earlier in the summer, before faculty have finalized their courses, so the project can be woven in more dynamically from the start.
Underlying all of it is a point Griffith made about framing AI for incoming students from day one: Treating it as "a tool to build rather than a device to cheat" sets a tone, he said, that carries through a student's entire relationship with the technology as well the university itself.
Check out the full webinar to learn more about Tulane's approach, and access the Educator Resource Kit for the Hullabaloo Hello! and Second Line Umbrella templates, which are ready to adapt for your own campus.
Interested in more examples of innovation in higher education? Explore the rest of our Academic Innovation Café series.
