Back in January 2012 I wrote about Piazza, the free online Q&A site used by instructors for teaching. Since then, Piazza has grown even more popular with STEM subjects. Piazza reports that over 1000 schools and 300,000 students have participated in online discussions using their system.
Instructors find advantage in using Piazza over other public online discussion forums because they have some control over aspects of the course like class signup, anonymous posting and private posting (only to instructors). For students, Piazza offers a modern-looking, intuitive user-interface.
When compared to the online discussion forums of learning management systems, our UW CS and Math students regularly ask to use Piazza instead when they have used it before. They state they like the way it looks and that answers to their questions are easy to find. Piazza is not alone in pinning answers to a question posting, but it is a successful method of presentation especially when combined, as it is, with a wiki-like editor for multiple answers and on-going discussion that also allows mathematics notation and media input.
As described in the previous post on Piazza, reasons to use Piazza include
A few professors add their own reasons for using Piazza in their own words here. Click on the full story under each short excerpt.
And for further reading on the benefits of online discussions in courses visit the links in the CTE section below.
Some new features have been added to Piazza in the last few years. They include
Original features of Piazza include
First, visit the UW Piazza course Piazza for University of Waterloo Instructors. It is a playground course where you can try out features and see how a Piazza course operates. To get an account in the course, just send me email.
Read through the Piazza quickstart guide. It is a short 12 page PDF document that includes
If you are in the CS department then the the folks at the CS Instructional Support Group can help you set up a Piazza course for your class. They have been using Piazza for years. If you are in other parts of the Math faculty or in other faculties, send me email. I've set up quite a few Piazza courses and can help you decide if Piazza is right for the purposes you have in mind and guide you through the setup process.
The UW Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) has a number of articles about the effective use of online discussions. For example,
And, if you are interested in exploring other online methods of communication consider looking at these CTE posts:
Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047
Last modification date: Thu Jul 2 23:50:59 2015.
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url: http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~pkates/CTE/blog/piazza/piazza2.html