Piazza is a relatively new startup founded in 2009. But what does it do? To quote from their main page:
Piazza is an online platform where students and instructors come together to learn and teach. It offers a refined Q&A environment along with key features for effective course collaboration. [...] Piazza uses the power of community to increase collaboration through wiki-style editing, endorsed posts, student-to-student learning, and instructor feedback.The primary function of Piazza is a web forum, where students can post questions to the class. The nice thing is that the student can choose to appear anonymous to the rest of the class, while you (as the instructor) can see their real identity. Other students are encouraged to respond to see if they themselves have understood the topic well enough.
Once a student has responded, another student may choose to edit and/or expand that answer. All changes are tracked in real time as the answer increases in length (and hopefully in depth, too)! At any given point you may choose to "endorse" a particular edit to guide the discussion in particular direction, and/or also provide your own answer which is separately highlighted as coming from you.
The best way is to play with Piazza yourself! I encourage you to visit http://piazza.com and check out some of the public classes that are being taught at schools like MIT, Stanford, and Columbia. While you may not be able to make edits, you can quickly see how the system works on a variety of different topics, ranging from Mathematics to Psychology, from Biology to Economics.
Piazza also functions as a course management system, thereby allowing you to post relevant updates, homeworks, and assignments, and also send emails out to the entire class1. The web-system also has a statistical report interface that allows you to quickly identify commonly asked questions and topics that the class may be struggling with. Finally, it has polling functionality built right in, so you can gather feedback from your students and track how you are improving as a teacher yourself.
It is exciting to see the new and creative ways of integrating state-of-the-art technologies into higher education. I believe Piazza is a promising step in this direction and would be fun to try in the classroom. What do you think about Piazza? Do you see any shortcomings that worry you? Any features that look awesome?! Share them in the comments below!
1 Piazza even connects to current systems that you may have at your institution, such as Blackboard and Moodle! See here.
It's worth noting that Piazza can be embedded within a Classes*v2 course site via LTI. Contact us at classes2@yale.edu if we can offer additional information.
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