What the Conversations Are Like
Without exaggeration, this is my favorite course I've taught in 10 or more years. I've thought a lot about why that is. I think it's partly because it was just pure fun for the students. They were so engaged. They would come to class and be dying to talk about what they talked about [on Sway].
I had several students this year from more conservative backgrounds say this was the first class where they felt that they could openly talk about certain things, such as trans women in women's sports. They also felt like they got a better understanding of more progressive perspectives. They felt safe, they felt affirmed, they felt part of the conversation in a way that they hadn't in other classes.
For someone who teaches in a very large program—300 students—civil discourse in the classroom is incredibly difficult to facilitate. Sway is just an unbelievably useful tool. Students are able to actually have in-depth, thoughtful, reflective, challenging conversations, which otherwise would be completely impossible in a class this size.
The engagement aspect is just a million times better than discussion boards. My experience with discussion board posts is that no one really thinks too much about them. They just respond once and do what they have to do. The ability for students to have a back and forth and actually have a real conversation was fantastic.
One of the things I love is that it's a format my students are very comfortable with. They're texting. They don't have to be on camera. They can take time to think through what they want to say and what they want to share.
Students get excited about Sway too. They're constantly being told not to use AI and they're being monitored and surveilled for their use of AI. So to have a way that we're actually integrating it in a way that's useful and effective for their learning has been amazing.
What Guide Does
The fact that Guide can force them to get more concrete, to give evidence, to think about real-world scenarios—it can do that so easily. It takes me weeks to come up with a good real-world scenario. To be able to just do that instantly—it's amazing.
Guide does particularly well at getting students to articulate where they still come apart. Guide does that all the time—"It seems like you've come to their position, do you agree now?" And the students say no, and then Guide says, "Well, it seems like you're saying this..." It forces them to articulate where they're still diverging.
Students have voiced that Sway brought about some realizations that they weren't coming to on their own. Guide would say things like, "It sounds like what you're saying is this," or "Here's where it looks like the tension is between your opinions." It helped them continue the dialogue in a productive way where they maybe felt stuck.
One of the things that I really appreciate about Sway is that it harnesses the best of AI. What I love about Sway is that it uses AI in a facilitating way. When I build upon the Sway results and instructor reports, it's very specific and unique to our class, to my students' conversations. It's facilitated, but it is a disincentive for my students to phone it in using generative AI.
The students know that part of getting credit requires responding to an understanding quiz. I think that is a brilliant way to set up the incentive for students to try to understand what the other person is saying—to really understand it, because they have to answer.
Students know that Guide is AI and they find it not at all partisan, not at all biased. That was never an issue. Anytime you're a faculty member, particularly if you're a political scientist, students are always trying to guess your political views. They did not perceive the robot as having a perspective.
You can see the students appreciate the opportunity to put to immediate use the skills that we teach them in the classroom, and then actually put one foot in front of another and practice taking those baby steps.
Guide's main purpose for my students was really keeping the conversation moving forward. Students find it boring when they get stuck at some point in the discussion. We all do. We want things to be lively, fun, to go back and forth in a way that keeps us all on our toes. And that's something Guide helps do.
I could tell in the students' writing they were driven—annoyed even... "Guide keeps telling me I haven't found a consistent principle." Many of them wrote their papers about that. Some disagreed with Guide in their papers: "Guide kept saying there was no coherent principle—and here's how I think it works." That was really wonderful.
Sway is training them how to talk about these things in a way that is respectful, effective. They are learning skills from Guide to have those difficult conversations with each other and to express their views when they disagree in a way that is productive, not harmful, not oppressive.
Confidence with Sensitive Topics
One thing that helped a ton for me as an instructor was knowing that I could trust Sway to moderate their conversations. The absence of such a moderation tool has really been a big part of the reason that I've been unable to have more meaningful discussions.
Sway has impacted my confidence in being able to bring up or assign discussions that maybe I might not be as comfortable doing in class. With really sensitive topics there's a necessity to be able to step in immediately when something is even inadvertently said that's really disrespectful. But what Sway provides is the opportunity to do those types of things because you can trust that Guide is going to step in.
I've relied on the themes that I would get back in those reports and then have conversations with students—"Here are some of the common themes that came up. Let's talk about those." That has really increased my confidence because it feels a lot safer to identify these general ideas that have come up in the class as a whole rather than "this student is saying this right now and we're all going to respond to it."
One student said they were "shaking and sweaty" when starting a conversation about whether pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to release abortion pills. But the conversation stayed respectful.
Why It Works
One of the things I love most about Sway is how easy it is to use. I pivoted to jumping right in with my 60 students. It was very easy to implement. I could tell a lot of thoughtful preparation was put into the instructor resources. It made it easier for me to use just right away.
I've tried things like the discussion board and students just don't engage. Nobody reads anybody else's posts. They write something, check the box, and they're done. We're calling it a discussion but there is no discussion. With Sway, they read 100% of what the other person wrote because they have to respond to it.
My students love Sway. They have fun with it. They really like connecting with each other—and that isn't always possible in online teaching or in-person teaching right now. They love hearing what other people are truly thinking about. Sway helps bring that out.
[Before using Sway] I was really quite taken aback by the plagiarism I was seeing, using ChatGPT to do it. And to be honest, for the first time in my career, I really was starting to feel like, "What am I doing this for?" Then Sway came and it really changed things. It got students to actually engage.
Their views changed over time, which almost never happens in other essays or formats that I've used.
My requirement was that students finish at least 10 thirty-minute conversations on chat. 100% of my students did it. Some of them did 13 out of 14. I don't usually have assignments where 100% of people follow through and finish. I think that's a testimony to it being lively, interesting, and fun.
In-Person Effects
I've noticed that they bring into the classroom a comfort and an ease. It brings a lightness to the room when they are done with Sway, because they know that they can disagree. They know that they are supported in exploring their ideas—without worrying about "making a mistake" or saying the wrong thing.
Students are more likely to pull in other students into the conversation in class. Someone will make a comment and then they'll say, "I don't have the perspective of such and such. Does someone here have that perspective that they can offer?" Or they will notice a student being quiet and say, "Hey, I know I've talked to you before. You have some really good insights. Can you share something in this conversation?"
For the first time ever, some of my online students came to my in-person office hours. In part, it was because they wanted to follow up about something that had popped up in their Sway discussion. [...] In dozens and dozens of essays, students were mentioning things that their Sway chat partner said. I could never get them to do that with discussion boards.
As early as last week, someone mentioned in class as we were wrapping up a debate in person in small groups—they mentioned Sway and implementing something that they had learned from Sway, and how grateful they were. This is like 14, 15 weeks later since the beginning of the semester.
Instructor Reports
In my experience, Sway gave me an incredibly helpful baseline of data to work from. I knew where [my students] were. I knew what the diversity of opinion was. I knew how malleable maybe some of the thinking was, and where the sticking points were going to be. I've never had that before. In a class of almost 300, that's tough to pitch at the right level. Now I have that information.
Having them do the conversations and getting that digested report helped me immensely to identify common misconceptions I needed to clarify and to identify really interesting points students had discovered. After each Sway chat, I would record a follow-up video lecture that clarified common misconceptions. Those follow-up videos definitely made a difference because those misconceptions were not there in the final work.
The instructor report that's provided is invaluable. The level of detail was very impressive to me. I read through it two or three times. The richness of the qualitative data—themes, Guide's role, common ground, persistent disagreements, insights, possible misconceptions—was wonderful to see. It was helpful for me as an instructor to get a sense of where my students are coming from at the beginning of the semester on some key issues.
I have used the instructor reports to initiate follow-up conversations with my students. I have also created exam questions using those summaries as launching places—so that it's not one and done. They keep reflecting on these differences and go deeper with their ideas connected to the class content.
It's useful on many levels. It's useful for the students. It's useful for instructors. It's also useful in a lockstep program like the one that I teach in to see their development. To actually have those instructor reports—it's very compelling. You can have the data when you're going through accreditation or any kind of review as a program.
We have transfer students who come in. In the past, there's been a wide gap from the beginning, and it's hard to get them to the place where some of the other students are. Sway has really been amazing for the transfer students to help scaffold their learning and bridge them in much quicker into the ability to have critically analyzed conversations.
Open Inquiry
The students are really craving opportunities to talk about controversial topics with people who disagree. I really emphasized that this was the class where they were going to get this opportunity to talk across difference. Again and again, when I asked them what they liked about the class or what they were looking forward to, this was the aspect that students repeated.
The Sway experience brings them to this place where they realize it's actually okay to disagree on these topics with someone else, which might sound silly, but I think we're in this moment in time where that doesn't always feel okay anymore.
I hope the students coming out of my class will become ambassadors for dialogue across difference. They're our future. Right now, I think the nation is in a crisis and people are exhausted, and we just cannot continue this way. We're divided, and there's a lot of pain. I feel like dialogue can be a balm. We can rediscover the humanity of our opponents—or people who we think are opponents.
Before Sway, there would come a time where I would feel like the right thing to do is to try to get us to move on, because people are being harmed, or not making progress... But that is so concerning, especially when we think about higher education, and the whole purpose of it should be to have these difficult, challenging conversations, to learn to debate and disagree.
Lasting Habits
They are more up to the task now of talking to anybody anywhere. And they also developed an appreciation for what was fun about that. One of my favorite things to do is talk to random people at airports. It's interesting because you don't know anything about them and they don't know anything about you. Too many people just think you don't talk to strangers. They're more open to one another now as a result of Sway.
Pretty soon they're making meaningful strides to building bridges and understanding one another, and then going forth from our university to better serve in their professions. What a difference that would make in the world if students could do that more effectively.
Sway creates the opportunity for them to see a problem and, instead of viewing the issue as "you versus me," shift it into "us versus the issue." How can we come alongside one another with open minds to find out what is the best outcome—regardless of where we started? It's not an adversarial conversation. It's a partnership in pursuing the truth.
The dialoguing-across-difference skills that my students have gotten in the class are just as important, if not more important, than any of the content they learned about gender.
What I'm hoping for in my students' use of Sway is that long after they leave our doors and our hallways and after they cross that graduation stage, they've developed the skills of civil discourse, they've developed skills of empathy, and even just a desire to understand the perspectives of other people.
Director of Leadership Development
Gerstell Academy
Director, Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics
University of Pennsylvania
Fullerton College
California State University, Long Beach
Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy
University of Toronto
Department of Psychology
Brigham Young University
Fanshawe College
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What using Sway in a course involves.