THE FILOS PROJECT
Phase 1: Creating the Connection
In this first phase, students are immersed in a one-on-one discussion environment where they may share personal stories and experiences without being influenced by initial biases/prejudices.
Opening a Session
After students create a profile and join a teacher's class, teachers may request a session with another class. Using demographic, regional, and student questionnaire data, our proprietary Filos Algorithm will pair two classes composed of students with different and diverse backgrounds. By connecting students with different cultural, religious, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, the Filos Algorithm is designed to expose students to different communities and perspectives.
Starting the Conversation
Within a session, students are immersed in an interactive, one-on-one discussion-based environment. To prevent initial prejudices, identities of the students are masked by an anonymous, assigned student identifier.
To initiate conversation, we utilize artificial intelligence to suggest relevant "icebreaker" questions. Within the discussion, teachers may provide questions that are specifically tailored to curriculum being discussed in the classroom, or choose from a list of questions created by other Filos Educators.
In order to foster authentic discussions, Filos does not permit teachers to view and monitor content discussed in the discussion-based environment to protect student privacy. However, within a discussion, students have the ability to "flag" a message at any time they feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or believe that the sender has violated our terms of service.
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As soon as a student flags a message, the discussion-based environment is immediately halted and all communication between the student and the sender is disabled. Both teachers are notified that a conversation has been temporarily halted. At this point, teachers have the ability to view the content that was discussed between the two students and choose how to proceed.
Creating Authentic, Productive Discussion
