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With the school year wrapping up, Adobe's newest AI tool could help students cram for finals. The company on Tuesday introduced Student Spaces in Acrobat, a new learning space for college students to get personalized study help.
Student Spaces lives inside Adobe Acrobat. You simply upload your course materials, assuming you have the rights to them (don't upload your entire textbook). Adobe's AI will create custom study materials. You can make study guides, flashcards, quizzes, podcasts, video overviews, presentations, mind maps and custom lesson plans. It's primarily designed for college students, but any student may find it useful.
These AI-generated study materials are rooted in the "ground truth" of the material you upload and will cite its sources with every question, so you can see where a piece of information was pulled from. If you've used Google's NotebookLM, it has a similar feel.
Student Spaces was built by Adobe's education team, led by Vice President Charlie Miller, who's also a veteran college professor. The Adobe team worked with and solicited feedback from more than 500 students across six universities.
Student Spaces was intentionally designed to include a wide variety of study tools so that every kind of learner could use it, Miller said.
"As much as possible, we do want to be agnostic to the type of learning or the type of content," Miller said in an interview with CNET. Auditory and visual learners could use the podcast and video overview tools, for example. Math students could use the AI tutor to solve equations, while history students could use quizzes and flashcards to remember important events.
Two of the biggest things students want from an AI study tool are the ability to collaborate with classmates and to have all the tools in one place. Adobe built Student Spaces to be easily shareable through Discord, WhatsApp and GroupMe. You can also share specific study tools -- like practice quizzes -- without sharing your entire Student Space.
AI is playing an increasing role in education, with many educators and parents concerned about how kids are using the new tech. More general-use AI tools like chatbots may make it harder for students to critically think through assignments, one study found. Adobe's AI builds more traditional study tools that require a student to interact with it, not spitting out entire essays, for example.
Acrobat Student Spaces is now in public beta and available for free. If you don't have access to Adobe Acrobat, check whether your university offers access to Adobe Creative Cloud apps. If not, you can nab a subscription with a student email at a big discount.
