UC Irvine School of Education awarded $1.5M grant to advance AI in academic writing and digital literacy

By Rachel Rees Sampson
​January 8, 2025

The UC Irvine School of Education has been awarded a $1.5 million grant as part of the California Education Learning Lab’s prestigious AI Grand Challenge: Leveraging AI for Teaching and Learning. This competitive grant program aims to foster innovation in using artificial intelligence to enhance teaching, learning, and equity across California’s public higher education system.

Led by PI Mark Warschauer, School of Education Distinguished Professor and co-PI Tamara Tate, School of Education project scientist, "Enhancing Academic Writing and Digital Literacy with an AI Coach," will leverage AI technology to support students in developing critical academic writing and digital literacy skills. UC Irvine’s School of Education is proud to serve as the lead institution on this initiative, in partnership with California State University, Fullerton, and the North Orange County Community College District.

The project will deploy and further develop the PapyrusAI platform, first developed by Tate and Warschauer with National Science Foundation funding. "PapyrusAI has been highly successful in promoting writing and AI literacy within the UCI School of Engineering communication courses," noted Warschauer. "This grant will allow us to further scale it up for use in a broad range of foundational and disciplinary writing courses in the UC, CSU, and California Community College systems."

This initiative is part of a cohort of five selected projects designed to impact teaching and learning experiences statewide. Collectively, these projects are anticipated to engage over 146,850 students and 13,579 faculty members across California’s public higher education institutions.