managing an assignment
This page covers what you can do while an assignment is running, and how to give students credit for it. You will not normally need any of it: once an assignment launches it runs itself, and the results arrive in your inbox when it closes. This walkthrough is for the uncommon occasions when you might need to intervene during an active assignment.
This page assumes the assignment already exists; creating an assignment covers setting one up. QuickMatches are managed differently and have their own walkthrough.
A drawing of the Sway manage screen for a running assignment, shown one screen at a time as you scroll. It illustrates the steps described below; nothing in it acts on the real product.
LaunchFri Sep 11, 9:00 AM
Opinions dueMon Sep 14, 11:59 PM
Assignment dueThu Sep 17, 11:59 PM
Minimum chat30 minutes
topics
- medical paternalismMedical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high.
- kidney marketsWe should legalize kidney markets.
- abortionIn most cases, abortion is morally permissible and should be legal.
+ Add topic
roster
| Student | |
|---|---|
| Jordan (jalvarez@swayu.edu) | |
| Riley (rchen@swayu.edu) | |
| Morgan (mosei@swayu.edu) | |
| Tess (tfarrow@swayu.edu) | |
| Kai (kwhitfield@swayu.edu) | |
| Devon (dpark@swayu.edu) |
won't be included in the next assignment
| Student | |
|---|---|
| Devon (dpark@swayu.edu) | Reactivate |
LaunchFri Sep 11, 9:00 AM
Opinions dueMon Sep 14, 11:59 PM
Assignment dueThu Sep 17, 11:59 PM
Minimum chat30 minutes
topics
- medical paternalismMedical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high.
- kidney marketsWe should legalize kidney markets.
- abortionIn most cases, abortion is morally permissible and should be legal.
+ Add topic
If this screen isn't already familiar to you, start with creating an assignment.
You're about to walk through how to manage an assignment while it's running.
Pressing the space bar goes to the next screen, or you can scroll.
01 Three tabs
Assignment details is what you filled in at setup: the topics, the three deadlines, and the minimum chat duration. It's also where you rename the assignment or add a topic.
Students lists everyone who has signed up. It is where you offer a student Chat with Guide or suspend an account — the only two things you can do to a single student while an assignment runs.
Suspended accounts only matters once you've suspended someone. It's where you put them back.
If you're not already familiar with this screen, go back to creating an assignment.
02 Students tab
Everyone who has signed up is listed here by first name and school email. Each row has a menu holding two actions: Offer Chat with Guide and Suspend Account.
Sway doesn't store last names, so if you write to Sway's support team about a particular student, give their school email. A first name may not be enough to identify them.
if a row can't be acted on
Both actions need the student to have shared their identity with you, so a row marked “identity not shared” can't be acted on at all. Request All Identities, at the bottom of this tab, emails a permission link to everyone who hasn't granted it yet. The link is good for a week, and students with a request already open are not emailed again.
03 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. Chat with Guide is the fallback for when that conversation definitely cannot happen: for example, if a student tells you they will not be able to chat even though they've already been matched with a classmate. It offers the student left behind a guide to finish the conversation with, so they can still complete the assignment.
Offer it only in those cases. A partner who has been quiet for a few hours is usually not gone, and an offer made early replaces a discussion between two classmates with one between a student and software.
when it does not apply
Guide is never used to fill an odd headcount at matching time; this applies only to a student who was matched with a real partner who then stopped taking part. It is also deliberately not offered to a student who missed the opinion deadline, so that nobody has a reason to skip the deadline and talk to Guide instead of a classmate.
04 Partner Action
Offering one student Chat with Guide can leave their partner unaccounted for, so Sway asks what should happen to them in the same step. There are three choices:
- Chat with Guide, the default. The partner gets the same offer, by email as well as a banner, 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 cannot take part, End Participation is the one to choose. Nothing happens to the partner until the first student accepts the offer.
how this shows up in the spreadsheet
The partner you acted on shows UNKNOWN in the Abandoned partner column rather than TRUE or FALSE: once an instructor has intervened, Sway can no longer judge whether they would have abandoned the chat on their own. The student who finished with Guide is not marked that way.
05 Suspend Account
Suspension applies to your class only and doesn't affect 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 their instructor and get an email saying the same. Neither can be recalled, so be sure before you use it.
The action appears only on a row where the student has shared their identity, and only while they aren't in the middle of a chat.
the deadline for undoing it
A suspension you impose never lifts on its own. You reactivate the student yourself, from the Suspended accounts tab, and it has to be before the current opinion deadline. After that deadline nobody can add them back into that assignment, Sway's support team included: matching has already run, and a late reactivation cannot be fitted into pairs that already exist.
06 Suspended accounts tab
Suspended students are listed here, and this is where you can reactivate them. It has to happen before the opinion deadline of the assignment currently running, or it won't take effect for that assignment. You are unlikely to forget: Sway tells you if you have suspended students when you go to schedule a new assignment.
Sway also suspends students automatically when they never turn up or abandon a chat mid-assignment. A first automatic suspension lifts on its own. A later one only lifts on its own after three completed assignments in a row with nothing else going wrong, so a repeat ghoster stays suspended until you reactivate them here.
what we have not confirmed
We haven't independently confirmed the exact wording of the reactivate control on this tab. We have confirmed that it isn't inside a row's menu, the way the two actions on the Students tab are.
07 Manually Exporting Results
Export Results is not on either tab. It is in the assignment's own menu, on the card in the left rail — the three dots beside the assignment, not the ones on a student's row.
The menu holds two items. Export Results is the one that produces the spreadsheet. Delete sits above it while the assignment is still scheduled, and drops out of the menu once it goes active.
08 Export Results spreadsheet
Export Results emails this spreadsheet to you and any coinstructors a little after you click it, with one row per student who has shared their identity. This is the file to use for assigning credit. It's also emailed to you automatically when an assignment completes or when a QuickMatch is toggled off.
what each column means
Completed is TRUE only once chat progress reaches 100% — it has nothing to do with the quiz, so a finished chat can still carry a blank or unfinished quiz score. Assignment progress itself rounds down to the nearest 5% and only ever climbs. Chat partner lists whoever the student was matched with, and reads “continued with Guide” when their partner left and they finished the conversation with Guide instead — what happened with Riley and Tess. Understanding quiz score has three states, not two: blank while the chat is still short of 100%, the words “Not completed” once the chat is done but the quiz isn't, and a percentage once both are. Abandoned partner has three answers of its own: FALSE means Sway is confident the student didn't abandon the chat, TRUE means the opposite, and UNKNOWN shows up specifically on a partner an instructor manually intervened on — Tess, in the row above, since her partner was offered Chat with Guide rather than left to the automatic system.
Up next
Running a QuickMatch instead.
Managing a QuickMatch
The QuickMatch equivalent of this page — Force Matches, Force Completion, and the four-item menu QuickMatch uses instead of deadlines.
Read it →Reports showcase
How other instructors are reading the de-identified report Sway emails once things wrap up.
See examples →Sign up
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