Canva launches a new paid subscription for universities and colleges

Canva, the online graphic design platform, launched Canva for Campus today, a new paid subscription for universities and colleges. The subscription gives students, professors, staff and campus administrators access to Canva’s full suite of tools, such as professional and educational templates like reports, presentations and other documents, plus millions of stock images, videos, audio, infographics and more.

Canva for Campus is now available for all higher education institutions around the world. It has already been available for select schools, including  Dartmouth College, Vanderbilt University and the University of Redlands.

The subscription is essentially a version of Canva for Teams, which launched in August 2022. It has the same features as Teams but with a focus on schools and universities. This includes its entire Visual Worksuite, such as Canva Docs, Canva Websites, Canva Whiteboards and Data Visualization.

With Canva for Campus, students, faculty, staff and other departments are divided into “teams.” Each team gets 1TB of storage. Team members will be able to brainstorm with the whiteboard collaboration tool, create content like group projects or lectures, as well as provide feedback in real-time with text or visual sticker comments, share, edit and review all in one place.

Pricing for the new subscription varies, depending on the total student body size. Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams explained to TechCrunch that users only pay for staff accounts and once a certain threshold of staff licenses has been purchased, students get free access. For example, if a college or university has a student population of 5,000 and it purchases 60 staff licenses, all these students then get free access.

“For the past few years, we’ve been watching Canva become a loved tool in thousands of universities worldwide. We’re proud to help achieve their best results and gain the critical skill of visual communication to take with them into the workplace,” said Carly Daff, Head of Teams and Education at Canva. “By launching Canva for Campus, we hope to bring all university staff and students together to achieve their goals.”

Canva is considered a useful tool for students and businesses alike. In fact, there have been instances where companies include in job postings that they want applicants that have experience with Canva. There are even online courses that teach college students how to use Canva. As of 2022, Canva has more than 110 million users every month.

“With this new offering, we’re bridging the gap between school and the workplace, creating a natural pathway for students to become advocates and catalysts for adopting Canva in their future workplaces,” the company told TechCrunch.

Features for faculty and staff include the ability to create groups and folders and access approval workflows and analytics dashboards. Professors can also share assignments with students via integrations like Canvas, Blackboard, Schoology, BrightSpace and more.

Canva for Campus will likely be beneficial for college and university marketing teams as well since the subscription includes “Brand Kits,” where users can upload their brand fonts, colors and logos to create pre-made branded templates for newsletters, social media posts and student enrollment documents.

Separately, admins can enable a single sign-on (SSO) authentication method in order to manage staff and student access. They can also access admin reporting and permissions.

Canva for Campus is an extension of Canva for Education, which gives teachers and students free access to Canva’s premium features, like educational templates for any subject, grade (K-12), or topic; access to images, fonts, videos and animations; editing features; and the ability to give feedback on assignments. Teachers can also integrate with classroom tools, such as D2L, Moodle, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams. The company claims that over 30 million students and teachers across the globe use Canva for Education.