Cal State Fullerton faculty members are embarking on a grant project to train faculty and students on using artificial intelligence to enhance academic writing and digital literacy in higher education.
Starting this spring, faculty members Leslie Bruce and Beth Harnick-Shapiro will implement and evaluate a new AI tool called PapyrusAI, geared for students and faculty to increase equity and support the writing process.
Bruce, a faculty fellow for Writing Across the Curriculum LIAISONS and lecturer in English, comparative literature and linguistics, is directing the university’s grant project.
She founded and launched the Faculty Development Center’s WAC LIAISONS program in 2023 to support faculty adapting to AI in higher education. The grant project will add to the professional development opportunities LIAISONS offers to faculty.
Harnick-Shapiro, lecturer in computer science and faculty coordinator for Women in Computer Science and Engineering, is co-director. She was part of the Digital Learning Lab team at UC Irvine, which built and piloted PapyrusAI as part of a National Science Foundation grant.
“This grant project supports the Faculty Development Center’s efforts to integrate cutting-edge AI tools into our curriculum, enhancing both academic writing and digital literacy among our students to better prepare them for an AI-infused workforce,” said Kathleen Preston, executive director of the center and professor of psychology.
“Additionally, it will provide invaluable resources for faculty development, empowering our educators with the skills and knowledge to effectively incorporate AI into their teaching.”
The university is receiving $430,000 of a $1.5 million grant from the California Education Learning Lab for the AI project. It is one of five grants awarded statewide to promote the advancement of AI development and use within public higher education in California.
Bruce, Harnick-Shapiro and Stephanie Tran at Cypress College will develop and facilitate a Papyrus AI Boot Camp, followed by creating a 2025-26 PapyrusAI Faculty Learning Community.
The faculty learning community will guide up to 15 CSUF faculty members as they integrate and test the tool in their writing courses.
“The grant is funding faculty who are training to integrate AI into their writing courses and identify what works for students and what doesn’t,” Bruce said.
Faculty participation is key to discovering how the tool impacts students’ AI literacy and writing processes. Bruce said the number of CSUF faculty involved will increase to 30 in 2026 and up to 45 in 2027.
Starting this spring, Bruce plans to integrate PapyrusAI into her Scientific Writing courses to test its abilities as a writing coach. This hands-on experience will support the team’s refinement of the tool’s existing prompts and modules.
Over the three-year project, PapyrusAI will be integrated into 360 CSUF classes across disciplines, with about 9,800 students taught how to use the PapyrusAI writing coach to support their writing processes and AI literacy.
Harnick-Shapiro said introducing the PapyrusAI tool to the university fosters pathways to build, evaluate and measure best practices across California’s three higher education systems while examining what an AI-infused writing curriculum means for CSUF students and faculty.
“The project brings financial support for faculty to assess the opportunities and disruptions generative AI brings with a community of colleagues,” Harnick-Shapiro said. “We aim to identify, develop and share best practices based on faculty expertise and student feedback.”
CSUF is partnering with UCI and the North Orange County Community College District to provide equitable access to PapyrusAI, allowing researchers, faculty, and students to collaborate, evaluate and explore ethical, human-centered uses of generative AI.
Generative AI is a type of AI that can create content, such as text, images, music, videos and code, based on human inputs or prompts. An increasing number of generative AI tools are freely available, including ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
PapyrusAI was developed to act as a writing coach to support writing instruction, not replace writing or critical thinking, Harnick-Shapiro said.
“This grant offers timely, equitable access to a guided generative AI tool that students can use safely and faculty can use for research,” Harnick-Shapiro said. “PapyrusAI was built with transparency and protects student and faculty data.”
After faculty begin integrating PapyrusAI into their writing courses, Bruce, Harnick-Shapiro, Tran and their UCI partners will analyze the data generated by student and faculty interactions with the AI writing coach.
After testing and evaluating the AI writing tool and identifying best practices in AI-infused writing instruction are completed, the plan is to make PapyrusAI widely available.
“What we learn from student interactions with PapyrusAI will inform how Cal State Fullerton adapts to the expanding presence of generative AI in academia,” Bruce said.
