At a time when online conversations often harden into hostile echo chambers, a new platform developed at Dartmouth aims to expand a more historical approach to disagreeing: structured debate.
Called DEB8, the tool is a web-based platform that lets users post debate challenges, engage in live timed video exchanges, and store recordings for later review. Students can challenge each other’s ideas in a format designed to encourage clarity and intellectual exchange.
Mikhail Gronas
Developed by Mikhail Gronas, an associate professor in the Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies, with a small team of collaborators, the tool has been piloted in a handful of Dartmouth courses over the past year and is expanding across disciplines and to other universities.
Gronas started developing the platform about four years ago. He said the idea grew out of a simple question about the internet’s unrealized promise.
“We thought the internet would bring people together,” he says. “But it turned out that people mostly talk to those they agree with. And the echo chambers led to even narrower echo chambers, and then led to a very fragile society where you cannot argue your point of view.”
DEB8 attempts to reverse that trend by creating what he calls an “anti–echo chamber”—a space where disagreement is structured and productive.
“Debate is the age-old way to deal with disagreement—it requires respect for your opponent, and a real effort to understand their position. There’s an intellectual empathy to it,” he says.
Rather than replacing essays, debate offers a complementary way to evaluate student thinking.
“With AI, assessing writing assignments has become more challenging,” Gronas says. “We wanted to supplement papers with something more immediate, more interactive, and much more resistant to AI.”
He adds: “When you write a paper, you are not engaging directly with another point of view. In a debate, you are forced to engage in a very direct way. It’s more authentic. Debate is definitely the best way to learn about others’ perspectives and ideas.”
Debate club, reimagined
Over the past year, DEB8 was piloted in Russian literature and film courses taught by Gronas, and a winter course on emotions in literature taught by Valentina Yuryevna Apresyan, an associate professor in the Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies, with support from Dartmouth Dialogues. Roughly 100 student-to-student debates have taken place so far.
In Apresyan’s class, students debated interpretive questions drawn from complex literary texts.
“The debates required students to formulate interpretive positions on emotionally complex texts and defend them in interaction with another student,” she says.
Example topics included whether the river in Platonov’s “The River Potudan” symbolizes renewal or emotional erasure, whether the ending of Bulgakov’s “Embroidered Towel” is sad or joyful, or whether Tolstoy’s Strider in the eponymous story should be read as a tragic figure, she says.
Apresyan found that the format encouraged a different kind of engagement than traditional classroom discussion.
“The main strengths were the dynamism of the format, the need to formulate a clear position quickly, and, most importantly, the requirement to engage directly with another student’s interpretation,” Apresyan says. “It also created more varied classroom interaction than standard in-class discussions, where students often stay with friends.”
Students echoed an appreciation for that sense of immediacy and structure.
Angie Martinez ’26, an economics major from Monterrey, Mexico, used DEB8 in Apresyan’s course, participating in three debates over the term.
“The interface is very intuitive and organized,” Martinez says. “You can clearly see the topic, the participants, and the structure. During the debate, the layout makes it easy to follow the flow of rounds.”
She said the platform’s visual time bar helped her stay aware of pacing and remaining time.
“It challenges you to think on your feet and interact with your opponent’s arguments in a direct manner. That makes it more engaging than a regular discussion.”
Apresyan identified opportunities to refine the tool, including adding visual aids to track arguments and offering more flexible formats.
“It would help to have a visual board showing the main claims and supporting arguments, so ideas are not repeated,” she says. “And I would especially value the option for roundtable debates, not only one-on-one discussions.”
Addie Verrill ’28, an anthropology and Russian double major from Pittsfield, Maine, used DEB8 while helping test the platform last year.
“DEB8 is great because you can very easily set up a challenge, and the infrastructure really allows you to debate someone in a controlled environment without too much effort,” she says.
“I think DEB8 has a lot of potential as a resource for people to take part in discussions and debates in a structured format virtually,” Verrill says. “In a class or club that wants people to debate each other on various topics, I think it would be absolutely perfect.”
Gronas says that feedback has been central to the platform’s ongoing development. He acknowledges that, as a pilot project, DEB8 still has limitations, but he says most students responded positively. “I think a large majority liked it and had honest exchanges of opinions.”
Developments in the works include integrating the tool with Canvas, AI-assisted judging to evaluate debates, and new formats that assign topics to students at the start of a session to reduce the possibility of AI-assisted preparation.
“It’s a paradoxical platform because we both want to create a tool for live, AI-resilient interaction and assessment—live debates on class-related topics—and at the same time use AI to train and practice debates, and for fun,” Gronas says.
Looking ahead, Gronas plans to expand both the platform’s features and its reach. Gronas hopes to recruit more Dartmouth faculty to test DEB8 across disciplines such as sociology and business. Faculty at Columbia, Monash University in Australia, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem also plan to use the platform, Gronas says.
Beyond the classroom, he envisions DEB8 as part of a wider effort to encourage civil discourse online. One proposed feature would let users challenge others to a structured video debate directly from social media, replacing back-and-forth comment threads with a more focused exchange.
“If you disagree with someone, instead of arguing in comments, you challenge them to a debate,” Gronas says. “It creates a new behavior.”