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For Institutions

Something concrete to show your provost.

Most universities have not set an AI policy. Faculty are improvising in private, one assignment at a time. First Light is something a teaching center, a college, or a single program can put in faculty hands now, while the policy work catches up.

Talk about a pilot

Opens an email. Three quick questions, no form to fill out.

What anyone gets, free

  • Paste an assignment prompt. Receive a five-dimension analysis across context specificity, task openness, process visibility, output type, and verification surface. Each dimension scored 1–10 with the actual language from the assignment as evidence.
  • A specific punch list of revisions. Not generic advice. Each recommendation names a part of the assignment by phrase and explains exactly why an LLM cannot fluently produce the proposed step, given current model capabilities.
  • A printable PDF report faculty can take to a department chair, a CTL conversation, or a syllabus committee.

Available right now at FirstLightAssignments.com. No login, no pilot required, no institutional setup.

What the institutional pilot adds

  • Faculty who have agreed to take part. Not a link on a listserv. We identify the specific colleagues who want in, and have that conversation before anything starts. A pilot nobody uses is worse than no pilot.
  • A short survey at the start, and the same one at the end. So you can say whether anything actually moved, rather than that people seemed to like it.
  • Working sessions across the term. Faculty bring an assignment they ran and what it told them. This is where the useful conversation happens, and where you find out what the tool gets wrong.
  • Direct access to the faculty member who built it. Not a support queue. A real line to the person designing the tool, for questions, complaints, and the patterns you’re seeing on the ground.
  • A checkpoint where a decision gets made. What your faculty found, what changed, what didn’t work, and whether it is worth carrying on. A concrete reference point to take upward. Straightforward continuation if it works; clean exit if it doesn’t.

Who’s behind First Light

First Light is built by John Nash, a faculty member and researcher focused on applied AI use in education. It comes out of the same problem your faculty are facing: assignments that no longer hold up under AI. It is designed by someone working that question directly, not a vendor selling into education from the outside.

Pilot logistics

Free for the length of the pilot, with unlimited use by the faculty taking part. How long it runs and how it is organized get fitted to your institution — some run a semester, some a full year, and a system office will shape it differently than a single program. What stays the same is the list above.

What we need from you is the kickoff, the checkpoint, and a close at the end. The working sessions are for your faculty, not for you.

Why now

Two things are converging. Faculty are losing trust in their own assignments and asking for help. And provosts are asking what the institution is doing about AI in coursework, while the formal policy work is months or years out.

Policy tells faculty what is and is not permitted. It does not tell them how to rebuild an assignment so the question stops arising. That is the gap First Light works in: the assignment itself, before it is given, in private, without waiting for anyone.

It never sees student work and it never makes an allegation about a student. It requires no LMS integration and nothing to install.

Data practices in one paragraph

Assignment text is sent to Anthropic’s API for analysis. Anthropic deletes both the text and the analysis within 30 days, and uses neither to train its models. First Light keeps no copies on our servers. Faculty see an explicit reminder at paste time not to submit student work; we don’t enforce this technically, and the workflow is designed around analyzing assignment prompts, not student submissions.

Full data practices

This pilot cohort is higher-education-focused. K-12 and independent schools, especially those running on Canvas or other major LMS infrastructure, are welcome to use the homepage tool, and institutional conversations with secondary schools will follow.

One email starts the conversation.

If your center, college, or program is wrestling with AI in coursework right now, write three sentences and we’ll find time.

Talk about a pilot

First Light · For educational use · © 2026 First Light Technology, Inc.

Data practices · Research basis