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Piazza - Overview (UW-Madison)
Select this link to list all Piazza documents from the Learn@UW-Madison Knowledgebase at the bottom of this page.
What is Piazza?
Piazza is a student-driven question and answer service that some instructors choose to use for their courses. Students can collaboratively work on answers by adding, modifying, or deleting content. Instructors can view students' questions and answers, post their own questions and answers, and endorse the best responses.
For more information, see UW-Madison's IT Services page on Piazza.
Tool Functionality Details
Basic Functionality
- Piazza is a student-driven question and answer service, it does not have any formal assessment capabilities such as graded discussions.
- It has a Instructor-endorsement feature. If a student answers another student's question, an instructor can "endorse" it. The instructor endorsement is visible to everyone in the class.
- Instructors can change visibility of posts after they have been made, moving them from a group to class-wide visibility (and vice versa).
- Students can mark responses as resolved/unresolved if they feel their question has not been answered.
- Everyone can reference other posts and replies using @mentions or this resource.
- Everyone can view the question history along the top of the post, to see who posted responses and when.
- Students can edit each other's posts, to have a collaborative wiki-style response
- Instructors can post Notes and notify students immediately via email, bypassing user notification settings.
- When posting a new question, Piazza offers a duplicate post suggestion, to alert the user and avoid redundancy.
Advanced Functionality
- Instructors can allow students to post anonymously, either to their fellow students or to everyone including the instructor. (See Configure Your Course to learn how)
- Piazza collects and displays a number of usage statistics.
- Discussions can be organized in channels called folders. (It's less linear than Canvas Discussions tool.) For example you can have a folder for HomeWork, Exam, and Topic and 'add' the same post to multiple channels.
- Enable group based discussions.
Use Cases
- (UW-Madison) - Example of how to use Piazza in a course (Microbiology).
- (UW-Madison) - Creating a Classroom Back Channel with Piazza
- (UW-Madison) - How to manage student questions with Piazza.
Getting Started
To get started with Piazza, see Piazza - Getting Started with Piazza
Additional Resources
- Documents
- (UW-Madison) - Comparison chart between Canvas and Piazza Discussions
- (Piazza) - Instructor resources and Q&A
- (Piazza) - Piazza documentation on getting started with Piazza.
- (Piazza) - Managing your Piazza class
- (Piazza) - Additional Resources for Instructors.
- Canvas Tech Modules
- These modules, developed by DoIT Academic Technology's Learn@UW-Madison team, are designed to help instructors introduce centrally supported learning technologies to their students. For more information, seeCanvas - Student Tech Modules in Canvas Commons
- Read more about Piazza features, learn how to get started, see how to configure your Piazza class and more athttps://support.piazza.com/support/home.