A working session for one assignment you are teaching this term. Nothing is saved, nothing is sent, nothing leaves this page. Copy your work out before you close the tab.
Why you are doing this
On Thursday morning three of the assistants your students use had problems inside the same few hours. The next morning the newest model shipped to business customers first and left people who pay for it waiting. Neither of those is an argument about whether students should use AI. Both are the same practical question, arriving twice in two days.
The question is what your assignment does on the morning the tool is not there.
This audit takes one assignment, finds every place it quietly assumes a working tool, and gives you one sentence you can paste into it. We are going to call that sentence the outage clause.
1. Pick one assignment and name its dependencies
Not your whole course. One assignment, the next one due. Write down up to six steps a student takes to finish it, and for each step name the tool that step assumes is working. If a step assumes nothing, write none. Being able to write none is the point.
2. Mark each one: the point, or a convenience
For every step above, decide one thing. Is the tool the point of that step, meaning the learning is in using it, or is it a convenience, meaning the student would still learn the thing a slower way? Type the word point or the word convenience in each box. There is no right answer and the ratio is the finding.
3. Write the outage clause
One sentence, in your voice, that you would add to this assignment so a student who cannot reach the tool still knows exactly what to do. Not a policy. An instruction. It should name what to submit instead and what happens to the deadline.
A test for the sentence: could a student read it at 11pm, on their phone, with the tool down, and know their next move without emailing you.
4. Read your own numbers back
Count how many of your steps came back as the point and how many came back as a convenience. Then write what that ratio tells you, and name the next assignment you would run this on.
That is one assignment.
You just did this by hand and it worked. Now count what is left. The assignments still on your schedule this term, times the sections you teach, each one carrying its own quiet list of assumptions and each one needing its own clause in your own voice.
Doing the first one by hand is not a step you skip. It is how you find out what your own ratio actually is, and no tool can tell you that. What a tool can do is carry the clause you just wrote into every assignment that needs it, without you retyping it nineteen times.