doing an assignment
Your students do a Sway assignment in two sittings: a one-minute opinion survey before the opinion deadline, then a chat with the classmate they are paired with, spread over the following days. The chat ends when it reaches the minimum duration you set, and a quiz and a short survey follow. The first time, they register and work through a consent screen before any of that. Use space bar to move to the next page.
Your own side of the same assignment is creating an assignment and managing an assignment.
A drawing of the Sway student interface, shown one screen at a time as you scroll. It illustrates the steps described below; nothing in it acts on the real product, and no real student's data appears in it.
SwayBeta | Registration
First name
Please only use your preferred first name. Do you want to change it?
Password
Confirm password
This page contains important information about your use of SwayBeta (hereafter, “Sway”). Please read it closely.
Summary of key points
- This research aims to improve the quality of student discussions
- Your participation is voluntary, and you may discontinue at any time
- Your school email is used for verification and login purposes only
- Your chats are encrypted and private by default
- Your data is not used for training commercial artificial intelligence (AI) models
- You control what information is shared with your instructor
SELECT ALL THAT APPLY:
- I have read and understood the consent form
- I am at least 18 years old
- I allow my instructor to verify that I have completed Sway assignments
- I allow educational research use of my anonymized message contents
Your Name
This is what you'll be known by on the platform. It doesn't need to be your real name, but it should be a real name — not an internet handle.
Optionally, you may also provide preferred pronouns:
Next, we'll collect your opinions on potential chat topics set by your instructor. This will automatically match you with other students to begin chatting at the time set by your instructor.
When you chat with another student about a particular topic, they will see:
- your stance on the topic (agree or disagree)
- your preferred first name
- your profile picture (if you upload one)
They will not see any other information about you or your use of Sway.
Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statements. Based on your responses, we will match you with a classmate who disagrees with you to chat about one of these topics.
| Strongly disagree | Moderately disagree | Slightly disagree | No idea! | Slightly agree | Moderately agree | Strongly agree | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high. | |||||||
| We should legalize kidney markets. | |||||||
| In most cases, abortion is morally permissible and should be legal. |
Remember: Your classmate will be expecting to hear from you. Since partners cannot be reassigned, please only continue if you are genuinely up for it.
- I commit to responding in a timely manner.
Chat partner available. Start a new chat!
No chat partner available. Try another topic or check back later!
-
medical paternalism
Medical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high.
-
kidney markets
We should legalize kidney markets.
-
abortion
In most cases, abortion is morally permissible and should be legal.
Pick a topic on the left to start chatting.
Deadline: Thu Sep 17, 11:59 PM
Progress40%
Wed
Deadline: Thu Sep 17, 11:59 PM
Progress100%
Thu
Deadline: Thu Sep 17, 11:59 PM
Progress100%
Thu
👋 Welcome, everyone!
Our topic is medical paternalism. We'll be discussing this statement:
Medical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high.
- Tess agrees with the statement.
- Riley disagrees with the statement.
My name is Guide, and I'm here to support your discussion. If you need anything, start your message with “Hey Guide” 🤓
Tue
Wed
Riley, you said you disagree — what bothers you most about a doctor deciding for a patient?
Wed
Thu
Thu
Enter a message
Question 1 of 5
- That patients are usually wrong about what they want.
- That the harm of the knowledge can outweigh the value of having it.
- That doctors have better training than patients do.
- That families should be told before the patient is.
- That it would be too expensive to implement.
- That most patients would not understand the form.
- That it treats a one-off decision as if it settled every later one.
- That it is already the law in most countries.
Now you've had a chance to discuss the topic, rate your level of agreement with the original statement again.
Remember, all responses to Sway surveys are private and never shown to your instructor.
Medical paternalism can be justified if the expected gain to patient welfare is sufficiently high.
| Strongly disagree | Moderately disagree | Slightly disagree | No idea | Slightly agree | Moderately agree | Strongly agree |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Scroll, or press space
You're about to walk through a Sway assignment as a student meets it, from the sign-up link to the survey at the end.
Pressing the space bar goes to the next screen, or you can scroll.
01 Registration
Students register once, from a link you give them with the class code already in it, so there is no code for them to get wrong. It has to be a school email: some classes accept only one domain, and it is how you know an account belongs to the student whose name is on it.
Sway asks for a first name and nothing else, and doesn't store surnames at all. A full name typed into the box isn't refused: a panel appears under the field offering to cut it down to the first word. Students type one often enough for it to matter.
if the activation email doesn't arrive
It normally lands within a few minutes. Spam is the first place to look; after that, resetting the password sends a fresh activation link, which is the quickest fix for an expired one too.
02 Consent
Sway is an education research project as well as a piece of software, so this screen says what is collected and asks what may be used.
Only the first box is required. The third is the one that matters to you: without it a student's name and email are never revealed to you, so you cannot give them credit. It and the fourth can be changed at any time in Settings.
The fourth is the research opt-in, and it's genuinely optional. The consent form says so in as many words, and a student who leaves it unticked gets exactly the same Sway as everyone else, credit included. Most leave it unticked.
why it asks about age
Nobody under 18 can consent to research use, so for those students the fourth box has no effect whatever they do with it. The full document behind the Consent Form button is the privacy policy on this site.
03 Your name
This is what a partner will call them. It doesn't have to be their real name, but it does have to be a name rather than a handle.
Pronouns are optional and used across the platform. If they're left blank, Sway guesses from the first name, so set them if the guess would be wrong.
04 What a partner sees
Sway sets this out before a student rates anything. A partner sees which side of the statement they're on, their first name, and their picture if they added one.
Not their ratings of the other statements, their email, or anything they said to anybody else.
05 Opinion survey
Every student has to do this. Nobody can extend the opinion deadline, including Sway's support team. Each statement gets a rating on a 7-point scale, and Sway pairs students from opposite sides of one of them.
did it go through?
Sway emails a receipt within a few minutes. If the receipt hasn't arrived, the opinions were not registered and the student has to submit again before the deadline. This is the single most common thing that goes wrong. Put it in your assignment text.
06 Topic list
After the survey, students land here: one row per statement, and a dot saying whether a classmate who disagrees is free to chat right now — green for yes, orange for no.
Orange is not a problem in an assignment. The opinion deadline guarantees a partner to every student who got their opinions in, whether or not one has turned up by then. In a QuickMatch, which has no deadline, orange means check back.
what a student cannot see here
Who they would be matched with, how any classmate rated anything, or how many people are waiting. Sway tells them nothing beyond the dot.
07 Chat
Guide opens by naming the topic, the statement, and which side each student is on, then gets out of the way. It comes back when it can help, and either student can call it by starting a message with Hey Guide.
The bar on the left is progress. It does not measure elapsed time: it is computed from the conversation — how much each of them has said, in what lengths and in what pattern — and it moves at the pace of whoever has contributed least. Long messages from one student do not move it.
stuck at 95%
Almost always one of three things: messages sent in a run without waiting for a reply, long speeches instead of exchanges, or a student talking about their own view rather than about what their partner said. The fix is a real back-and-forth.
08 Chat complete
Progress reaches 100% and this appears. Nothing was clicked to bring it up: the chat has met the minimum duration you set, which is what completes it.
Completing the chat is not completing the assignment. A student who stops here has a finished conversation, a blank quiz score and no post-chat survey, and in your results spreadsheet they read as Completed TRUE with the quiz column saying “Not completed”. Tell students the quiz and the survey are part of the work.
The pair are free to keep talking, and plenty do. Give me a moment is not a way out of the quiz — it swaps the notice for a banner, and the quiz goes on asking.
09 Understanding quiz
Five multiple-choice questions, four options each. Every one is about the partner — what they think, and why they think it.
It's written from the pair's own transcript after their chat ends, so no two students get the same quiz and there's nothing to revise. It takes a few seconds to prepare; the student sees a short wait.
does the student see their score?
No. The app never shows a score, a pass mark, or the correct answers. The score goes to you, in the results spreadsheet. A student not seeing one isn't a sign that anything failed.
10 Post-chat survey
The same statement, rated again. The two ratings taken together are how Sway measures whether anything moved, and they are what the instructor report is built out of.
The rest of the survey asks how the chat went, whether the partner was respectful and had better reasons than expected, and what the most interesting thing they said was. None of it reaches you attached to a name.
Done
With the quiz and survey behind them, the student lands back in the same conversation. It stays open, and the pair can carry on — a fair few do.
Two things reach you without your asking. The results spreadsheet has one row per student — whether they completed, who they talked to, their progress and their quiz score — and the de-identified report arrives once the assignment closes.
what happens next
Most of what goes wrong in a Sway assignment is a student not knowing something has happened, so Sway tells them: when the assignment opens, when a deadline is coming up and they haven't acted, when they are matched, when their partner replies, and when they have left their partner waiting on a reply. Students who want more than email can add the mobile app for push notifications, or a mobile number for texts; both carry the same messages. A student can mute the deadline and new-message emails in their own settings, but not the receipt for a submitted opinion survey, the notice that they have been matched, or the warning that a partner is waiting on them.
Three things belong in your assignment text. The opinion deadline is hard, and a student who misses it cannot take part at all. The quiz and the post-chat survey are part of the work, not an optional extra after it. And a student who leaves their partner waiting for days stops both of them finishing — what happens then is its own walkthrough.
95% of chats on Sway are between two students who disagree, and a chat only progresses while both of them keep messaging. For many students these turn out to be among the best conversations they have all term. See what they say on the feedback page, and the research behind it.
Up next
When it doesn't go like this, and your own side of the same assignment.
Rescuing a stalled chat
A student writes to say their partner has gone quiet and the deadline is tomorrow. What you can do, and what they see when you do it.
Read it →Leaving a partner waiting
The same story from the other side: the warnings Sway sends, and the suspension at the end of them.
Read it →Creating an assignment
Your side of the screens above: the topic statements, the minimum chat duration, and the three deadlines.
Read it →