I may be out of the loop here, but I've come up with a simple idea that may be grant-worthy. Yes, steal it. Beat me to the grant. The consequences for students' learning may be too great.
What I propose is simple: a writing environment online with the ease of Google Docs, but with one enormous feature disabled: copy/paste. In that regard, it would resemble the Respondus Lockdown Browser.
The difference? Faculty would organize their classes and assignments there, as with a learning-management system, but they would pick certain AI tools that could employed at each stage of the writing process. The tools would work only from within the writing environment, and the final stages of each step--from rough-draft to revision to later drafts--would be sent from within the browser to the faculty member, along with how each writer used any AI tools permitted.
My idea requires some coders adept at building a good client and we'd have to negotiate licensing for AI programs such as Research Rabbit, an LLM, a image / slide-deck generator, and multimedia tools such as ElevenLabs' podcast and text-to-voice generators.
By placing the tools within the writing environment and forbidding copy/paste from outside, drafting by cognitive offloading would no long be an issue.
I'm currently talking to a few colleagues who run our AI cluster on campus. I hope to have something sketched out, maybe even tested, in 2026.
Creative-Commons Image courtesy of oercommons.org
