Global Debate Platform Create Debate

Over the past several months, as we have shifted towards covering more education based startups, we have seen a ton of inventive products. Though a lot fall outside of this, there seems to be a trend towards increasingly complex and robust technologies. However, we just came across a pretty ingenious low-tech platform that has some potential. CreateDebate is a Reddit-like forum that allows users to debate and vote on various topics. CreateDebate stands out for its simplicity. One cannot overstate the power of a simple forum. We had a chance to speak with the CreateDebate team. They told us a bit more about the platform, as well as some of the education implications.

CreateDebate

What is CreateDebate?

CreateDebate is a global, social, decision-making tool designed to spur constructive unfiltered conversation and critical thinking. We provide online debate communities to educators, debate teams and learning institutions of all types and sizes. We also serve individuals, organizations, politicians and all levels of government.

Who is CreateDebate for?

The target consumers of our debate communities are educators of grades 5 – 12, as well as universities serving undergraduate through postgraduate studies. The site is used for teaching and practicing argumentation, as a forum for debating virtually any topic, for teaching digital citizenship, as a searchable knowledge base and as a forum for enhancing learning English as a second language (ESL) by requiring students to debate in English.

What makes CreateDebate unique?

There are several features that make our offering unique in comparison with a typical community offering. First and foremost we offer social debating with crowd sourced debates which provide more diversity and insight than one on one interactions. The debates can be created in a single or dual column format. The single column format is free form for open ended questions. The dual column format supports for and against debates. We offer the ability to create petitions and download the results. We provide three community tiers which consist of the global public community on the home page, segregated public communities as well as private communities. I think our coolest feature is the ability to have a debate assigned to multiple communities. This allows for cross community debating which as an example could take the form of getting public interaction in a debate that exists in a private community. It also allows debating between two different classes for the same instructor, different instructors or even different institutions without commingling the other debates in the individual communities.

What is the next step? What do your current goals look like?

Our current goals consist of enhancing the site and expanding membership. We are adding features such as polling which will allow site visitors who are not members to participate in the debate. We are developing a series of video tutorials which will be in our YouTube channel. Private communities are going to have the additional security measure of being able to limit member access to a single email domain. Our membership goal is to achieve one million active members by spring 2015 and be in the double digit millions by the closure of the 2016 presidential election.