A Strangely Easy Idea No Writing Teacher Has Discussed

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 for me to worry about being the first to put my name on it.

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.

In that regard, my writing environment looks something like an educational version of Grammarly that an executive once demoed for me. In that product, all work copied and pasted into to interface would be watermarked and AI tools could be disabled or enabled by the user. I'd put that power in the hands of the course instructor, where it belongs. As students tell me again and again, using AI is simply the norm now, and we faculty are wasting time focusing on detecting plagiarism with AI detectors I don't trust. Time and again, studies I've read indicate that they turn up too many false positives. 

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, and if we can find the coders and money, tested in 2026.

Creative-Commons Image courtesy of oercommons.org