frequently asked questions

Sway connects pairs of students who disagree over topics chosen by their instructor and scaffolds their discussions in two main ways:

1. Discussion guidance. An AI Guide participates in every chat. We’ve designed Guide to de-escalate tense moments, ensure students aren’t talking past each other, and make sure everyone’s voice gets heard. More importantly, Guide aims to improve student reasoning: it poses challenging questions, prompts students to clarify vague or incomplete arguments, unearths implicit assumptions, detects tensions and inconsistencies, and provides relevant factual information.

2. Charitable rephrasing. When a student composes a message that contains unconstructive language, the platform suggests a better way for the student to make their point. This feature aims to preserve the core meaning of the original message while providing immediate feedback to help students develop a habit of clear and respectful communication. Students are free to dismiss suggested rephrasings, but doing so will invoke Guide; this ensures the conversation doesn’t get derailed.

You can see Sway in action in this demo video and in de-identified transcripts from actual student discussions, and you can also check out student feedback on our website.

Guide employs a range of strategies. It helps keep conversations on track with instructor-configured topics while posing thoughtful questions to deepen the discussion and encourage critical thinking. When needed, Guide clarifies arguments or statements made by students and manages group dynamics by intervening to address unproductive exchanges or encourage more balanced participation. Additionally, it prompts students to respond to each other's key points, fostering direct engagement.

Adapting its communication style, Guide adjusts its tone and approach based on the flow of the conversation and student responses. It helps set an appropriate pace for the discussion, ensuring participants have space to express their views. By creating an environment where students can explore complex topics, challenge ideas respectfully, and gain deeper insights into different perspectives, Guide facilitates meaningful discussions even on controversial subjects.

Sway is not a chatbot that students talk to. Instead, it's a platform for students to chat with each other. The AI's function is to scaffold and enhance these human-to-human connections.

Sway’s Guide acts like a teacher or facilitator in the background, helping keep the conversation constructive and on-track. Guide might ask questions to deepen the discussion or help clarify muddy points, but the main conversation is always between two real students.

Think of Sway like the messaging apps you're used to, but with AI support to help students have better discussions about complex topics. The goal is to connect students who hold opposing opinions and guide them toward more open, informative, and constructive discussions.

We attempt to block all speech that would undermine the possibility of constructive disagreement. This includes slurs as well as clear threats, personal attacks, and mere insults that don't even attempt to further the conversation. While these models are not perfect, they are highly effective and we are always improving them.

When needed, Sway also helps students with their language before their messages are sent. When a student composes a message that contains unconstructive language, the platform suggests a better way for the student to make their point. This feature aims to preserve the core meaning of the original message while providing immediate feedback to help students develop a habit of clear and respectful communication. Students are free to dismiss suggested rephrasings, but doing so will invoke Guide; this ensures the conversation doesn’t get derailed

Check out this 3-minute explainer video

No. We want students to feel comfortable on Sway, so messages are stored in an encrypted database by default and are only decrypted when students access them. This means the contents of student chats are not accessible to anyone other than the students who participate in them. However, Sway provides useful information for instructors in Instructor Reports delivered after a discussion assignment concludes. This includes:

• AI-generated analysis to confirm students stayed on topic

• Common themes that emerged in student chats

• Key areas where students found consensus and where they persistently disagreed (coming soon)

• Sources that students drew on and other insights into how students are thinking about the material

Sway also generates Understanding Quizzes for students at the end of each discussion to measure how well the students understood each other. The scores from these quizzes are presented in the Reports.

If students elect to share their university-provisioned email addresses with you, you'll be able to match these data to specific students for granting course credit. Otherwise, students are identified only by randomly generated usernames. (If students don't grant this permission when they first access the app, you can get Sway to nag them later.)

Yes. Discussion assignments are chats between pairs of students on an instructor-specified topic. This short video explains how to set up an assignment. When instructors set up an assignment, they configure at least three topic statements that students can discuss. They also specify the minimum duration that the chat must last. Students then complete a brief survey eliciting their attitudes towards these statements. Using this information, Sway matches students into discussion groups, specifically aiming to maximize viewpoint diversity among the groups. This approach helps create intellectually diverse groups where students are likely to encounter perspectives that differ from their own.

Currently, we are focused on one-on-one chats (when a class has an odd number of students we create one group of three). However, we plan to support larger discussions in future releases.

To get access to Sway for your course, register using this form.

We're providing free access to Sway for instructors who want to use it as part of college-level courses. Once you submit the form, we'll review your request. We're contacting instructors who request access in the order in which requests are made, and we'll continue to provision Sway to new instructors for as long as our funding permits. When you're approved, you'll receive instructions on how to set up Sway for your course and how your students can create their accounts using their university-provisioned email addresses and a unique link that you'll share with them. If you'd like to provide Sway to larger communities (e.g., incoming students or an entire campus), contact us at support@swaybeta.ai.

We're proud to partner with Heterodox Academy and are prioritizing access for Campus Communities. If you're interested in using Sway in community events or other settings, contact us at support@swaybeta.ai—we'd love to hear from you!

We plan to open Sway to the public, but we do not currently have funding to do so. For now, our focus is on higher education, but if you have an interesting use case, please let us know: support@swaybeta.ai

The technical requirements for Sway are quite minimal:

• For students, pretty much any laptop, phone or tablet with an internet connection will work.

• Sway can run in a web browser on desktop computers.

• For mobile devices, iPhone and Android apps are coming soon. We'll announce on our website when they're available in the App Store and Play Store. In the meantime, students can receive notifications on their phones by enabling SMS or Whatsapp notifications.

• For longer discussions that unfold over days or weeks, we recommend using the mobile app once it's available, as it will send notifications when there are new messages.

• For discussions that take place in concentrated sittings, we suggest using the web app with a full-sized keyboard.

At the end of each Sway discussion assignment, the platform automatically generates a five-question quiz for each student. Quizzes are designed to measure how well the students understood each other. The questions are dynamically generated based on the content of the conversation, focusing on key points and arguments made by each participant. This ensures that the quiz is relevant to the specific discussion that took place.

Understanding Scores can provide useful insights, but they are not a validated measure and should not be used for formal student evaluation.

We maximize the representation of diverse perspectives through a thoughtful grouping process. When instructors set up a discussion, they configure topic statement(s) related to the subject. Students then complete a brief survey indicating their attitudes towards these statements. Using this information, Sway groups students into chats, specifically aiming to maximize pairs with differing viewpoints. This approach helps create intellectually diverse groups where students are likely to encounter perspectives that differ from their own. The goal is to foster rich, thought-provoking conversations by bringing together students with opposing views. This is key to Sway's mission of promoting more intelligent discussion between students, especially when they disagree. 

When you use Sway to offer for-credit discussion assignments, we need to ensure that all students get matched with a partner by a certain deadline. All Sway discussion assignments have an opinion deadline— the time by which students must complete the opinion survey, and the time after which students are guaranteed to be matched with a partner. You'll also set a minimum chat duration (see answer below for details), and students will be updated on their progress toward completing the assignment. Students receive emails reminding them about upcoming deadlines and messages they've left waiting for too long. 

When it's not possible to find a partner who disagrees on any of the topic statements by the opinion deadline, Sway will begin creating other kinds of pairings. For example, Guide might help two uncertain students explore the topic together, or one of two students who agree might be randomly chosen to play the role of devil's advocate. Crucially, in this last case, Guide will support the student playing devil's advocate as needed to ensure the devil gets effective representation.

Instructors can set a minimum duration for discussions, but this time will not exactly correspond to how long students take. Because students send messages at different paces and their chats can unfold asynchronously over days and weeks, the minimum discussion duration should be understood as an informed estimate of how long the discussion would take if the students were focused on exchanging messages of a typical length at a typical pace in a synchronous chat.

This means, for example, that if an instructor sets the minimum duration to 40 minutes, students don't need to engage in a continuous 40-minute back-and-forth to complete the assignment. Instead, they can send messages at their own pace, and their assignment will be marked as complete once their chat is long enough that it would have taken them around 40 minutes if they had sat down and chatted continuously at a normal pace. 

Students are free to continue chatting (and periodically testing their understanding) even after meeting the instructor-set minimum requirements. This flexibility allows instructors to tailor the discussions to fit their course needs—they could be brief exchanges or more extended conversations spanning days or weeks. For discussions that unfold over an extended period, we recommend that students use the mobile app (coming soon) as it will send notifications when students receive new messages. For more concentrated discussions, the web app with a full-sized keyboard is likely preferable.

Sway is free for instructors and students to use. It is funded by research grants, so there's no cost to use it in college-level courses. We developed Sway to help as many students as possible learn the art of constructive disagreement.

If you're an instructor interested in using Sway, you can get free access through the registration form. We're providing access to instructors on a first-come, first-served basis for as long as our funding allows.

No. When students first log in, they receive a straightforward explanation of our research, our privacy and data policies, and their rights if they decide to participate. Students who choose not to participate can still use Sway. The study consent document is available at www.swaybeta.ai/privacy.  

We take student privacy very seriously and follow best practices for hardening our systems and protecting student data (privacy). In the unlikely event of unauthorized access to personally identifiable information, we will notify instructors and institutions within 72 hours.

Student data is never used to train commercial AI models, and by default we do not use student data for research either. When students first log in to SwayBeta, they receive a straightforward explanation of our research, our privacy and data policies, and their rights if they decide to allow research use of their de-identified data. Students can use Sway regardless of their decision. Research oversight is provided by Carnegie Mellon University's Institutional Office of Research Integrity and Compliance. You can review our student consent form at www.swaybeta.ai/privacy.