the instructor app

Sign in

One login screen for everybody. Nothing on it says “instructor”; what happens after you press Login is decided by your role, and an instructor lands on the manage page while a student lands on their chats.

There is no instructor sign-up here. Accounts are set up by us, and your students register through a class link we give you.

Press Login.

Assignment details

The rail on the left holds your classes and everything you've created in the selected one. The pane on the right shows whichever of those is selected, under three tabs.

This tab is what you filled in at setup: the three deadlines, the minimum chat duration, and the topics. Deadlines stay editable until a few minutes before they fire; topics stay editable until launch.

Click the pencil, a date, + Add topic, or a tab.

Rename

The pencil beside the title swaps it for a text field and a Save button. Renaming is cosmetic — it changes what you see in the rail and what the results spreadsheet is called, and nothing else.

Assignments you never rename are numbered for you: Sway Assignment #1, #2, and so on.

Press Save.

Deadline picker

Each of the three deadlines is edited in place: click the value, a date-and-time picker opens, and Save writes it back. Sway emails you a summary when you save, then stays quiet for five minutes however many more changes you make, so a burst of edits produces one email rather than six.

A deadline must be a few minutes in the future, and one that has already fired cannot be moved. The opinion deadline is the hard one: past it, nobody can be added to the assignment, ourselves included.

Press Save or Cancel.

Add topic

A topic is two fields. The Label is a short handle — a word or two — that names the topic in the interface and in your report. The Description is the sentence students actually rate.

Between three and ten. Topics can only be added, edited or deleted before the assignment launches — once it is live these controls are simply not drawn, so it is worth getting them right first.

Press Add, or Cancel.

Matches table

Further down the same tab. The first five columns count groupings; the last two count students.

Before the opinion deadline the one to watch is Absent, since those students can still be reminded. Unmatched is not worth watching: a student sitting there is waiting for a classmate who disagrees with them, and the opinion deadline guarantees them a partner.

Hover a column headingTap a column heading for its definition.

Students tab

Everyone who has signed up, by preferred first name and school email. Sway doesn't store last names, so if you write to us about one student, give us their email.

A row reading Identity not shared is a student who hasn't given permission to be named to you. You can't act on that row at all, and they won't appear by name in your results. Request All Identities emails everyone who hasn't granted it yet.

Click the ⋮ on Riley's row or Devon's.

Row menu

Two actions exist, and this is the only place either of them lives. Both need the student to have shared their identity.

Only one of them is here, because Riley is mid-chat. Offer Chat with Guide appears for a student who is in an active chat; Suspend Account appears for one who isn't, since you can't suspend someone mid-conversation. Devon's menu, two rows down, is the other way round.

Press Offer Chat with Guide.

Row menu, Devon

Devon isn't in a chat, so this row offers the other action instead. Which student a menu belongs to matters here more than anywhere else in the product: everything that follows names them.

Press Suspend Account.

Offer Chat with Guide

A conversation between two students who disagree is what the assignment is for, and it is worth considerably more than a conversation with an AI. This is the fallback for when that conversation definitely cannot happen — a student tells you they can't chat after they've already been matched, say.

Offer it only then. Sway already makes this offer by itself: it watches the last twelve hours before the completion deadline, emails a warning six hours out, and offers the waiting student Guide three hours out if their partner still hasn't replied. A partner who has been quiet for an afternoon is usually not gone.

Press Continue.

Partner Action

Offering one student a way out leaves their partner unaccounted for, so Sway asks about them in the same step. Three choices:

• Chat with Guide, the default. The partner gets the same offer, by email as well as in the app, so both students can finish.
• End participation excuses the partner from this assignment with no penalty. Their account stays active for the next one.
• Suspend account does that and also blocks them from the next assignment.

When the partner is the student who told you they can't take part, End participation is the one to choose.

Press Confirm.

Success

A small confirmation that dismisses itself. What it is confirming is that the offer went out — not that anything has happened.

Nothing happens to the partner until the first student accepts. If they never do, both students are left exactly where they were.

Press Close.

Suspend Account

Suspension applies to your class only and doesn't touch anything the student is doing elsewhere in Sway. They can't take the next assignment in this class until you reactivate them.

They see a banner telling them to contact you, and get an email saying the same. Neither can be recalled once sent, so it's worth being sure.

Press Suspend.

Suspended accounts tab

Where suspended students are listed and where you put them back. It has to be before the opinion deadline of the assignment currently running: past that, Reactivate refuses outright and the student stays suspended, because matching has already happened and there is no pair to add them to.

Sway also suspends students automatically when they abandon a partner. A first automatic suspension lifts on its own; a later one only lifts once the student has put together a run of completed assignments, so a repeat offender stays here until you reactivate them.

Press Reactivate.

QuickMatch selected

The same pane, showing a QuickMatch instead of an assignment. The Details column is simply gone: a QuickMatch has a minimum chat duration and topics, and none of the three deadlines.

Everything you do to a running QuickMatch is on its row in the rail, not on these tabs — the toggle that turns it on and off, and the menu beside it.

Click the ⋮ on the QuickMatch row.

QuickMatch menu

Four items, and none of them asks you to confirm. They act the moment you press them.

• Force Matches pairs up whoever is still waiting. You will not normally need it: students match continuously as classmates who disagree with them arrive.
• Force Completion ends all chats and promotes students to the understanding quiz and post-chat feedback.
• Hide Progress takes the progress meter off students' screens.
• Export Results emails you the spreadsheet.

Press any of the four.

Force Matches

Pairs whoever is currently unmatched, including students who disagree with nobody — they get matched with someone who agrees, and one of them is asked to argue the other side.

This is also how a group of three forms in a QuickMatch. If exactly three students are left over, they get one shared chat. A single leftover student keeps waiting.

Go back to the menu and try another item.

Force Completion

Ends the chat phase: all chats end and students are promoted to the understanding quiz and post-chat feedback. Use it when you want to wrap a QuickMatch up — the end of a class, say — and have students finish the quiz and the survey.

Go back to the menu.

Hide Progress

Takes the progress meter off students' chat screens. The item then reads Show Progress, and puts it back.

We haven't independently confirmed exactly what students see in its place, so we're not going to draw it here.

Go back to the menu.

How many statements

+Create replaces the right-hand pane with a short form. It is the same form for an assignment and for a QuickMatch: which one you get is decided by an answer near the end.

You need between three and ten statements. More statements means more chances to find a disagreement, which matters most in a small class.

Creating an assignment goes through what each answer decides, in depth. This is just the screens.

Press Next.

Choosing the number

Three to ten. More statements means more chances that two students land on opposite sides of one, which matters most in a small class — a statement that splits a class of 30 evenly gives Sway 225 possible pairings; the same split in a class of 12 gives 36.

Under 20 students, five or more is worth it. Bigger classes work well with fewer.

Pick a number.

Name and statement

Two fields per topic, and the screen repeats until you've given them all. The name should fit in this sentence: “Today we are talking about [name].” The statement is what students rate.

Statements work best when they make a claim someone could reject, carry one idea rather than two, and split the class at least 70–30. There is a collection of statements that have worked.

Press Next.

Minimum chat duration

Despite the name, this is not elapsed time. Chats can stretch over days, so progress is computed from the conversation itself — how many messages of what lengths, in what pattern — and the number estimates how long that same conversation would take typed out back and forth in one sitting.

Progress is set by whichever student has contributed least, so no amount of writing by one eager student can carry the pair.

Press Next.

Assignment or QuickMatch

A QuickMatch matches students as soon as a classmate who disagrees is free. No deadlines, no guarantee of a partner at any particular time. Good for in-class activities and campus-wide discussions.

An Assignment is a QuickMatch plus an opinion deadline. Every student who submits their opinions before it is guaranteed a partner once it passes, whether or not anyone who disagrees has turned up. That's how Sway is set as homework.

Choose either row — they go different places.

Three deadlines

• Launch: when students can first see the assignment.
• Opinion: the deadline for rating the statements. Miss it and a student cannot participate.
• Completion: the deadline for reaching 100% and finishing the quiz.

The gaps matter more than the dates. Launch to opinion is how long students have to remember to log in and rate; opinion to completion is the window in which they can chat.

Press Next to finish setup.

Class with nothing in it

What a new class looks like. The assignments list says No assignments found, and the QuickMatch card isn't drawn at all — it only appears once a QuickMatch exists.

The tabs are still there, with an empty details panel behind them.

Press +Create.

Class switcher

You get a dropdown here only if you have more than one class; with one, it's a plain heading. Everything in the rail belongs to whichever class is chosen.

If you teach several sections of one course, we recommend combining them into a single Sway class. More students in one pool means better matching.

Pick ECON 180 and watch the rail change.

Second class

A lecture course running a QuickMatch after each lecture rather than a graded assignment: different topics, a shorter minimum chat, no deadlines, and nothing in the assignments list.

Nothing carries between classes. Suspensions, topics, students and results are all per-class.

Switch back with the class selector.

Help menu

Three items, and all three leave Sway for this website: a short explainer video, the help bot, and the instructor resources page.

There is no other help affordance in the instructor interface — no question mark, no tour, no contextual panel.

Press any of them.

Leaving Sway

In the real app each of those three opens a new tab on this website. Since this page is a drawing rather than the product, it says so instead.

The help bot answers most instructor questions and escalates the ones it can't to us.

Press Close, or open the help bot for real.

Account menu

Two items. Class management is the page you're already on, and Logout ends the session — there are no preferences to set. Students get six items and a settings page; that's on the student side.

Press Logout to see the sign-in screen.

Assignment menu

Export Results is not on either tab. It's in the assignment's own menu, on its card in the rail — the three dots beside the assignment, not the ones on a student's row.

Delete sits above it while an assignment is still scheduled and drops out of the menu once it goes active.

Press Export Results.

Export Results

Nothing downloads. The page reloads with this message, and a few moments later the spreadsheet arrives by email — to you and to any coinstructors on the class.

You don't normally need to press it at all: the same file is emailed automatically when an assignment completes, and when a QuickMatch is switched off.

Press Open the email.

Results spreadsheet

One row per student, and the file to grade from.

A student who never shared their identity appears as Identity not shared in every cell that would have named them, which is why the Students tab has a button for asking.

Two more sheets come with it: message timestamps per student, and — once the class has run more than one activity — a comparison across all of them.

Press Back to Sway.