Piazza :: Piazza - Overview [UW-Madison]

Select this link to list all Piazza documents from the Learn@UW Knowledgebase at the bottom of this page.

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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

Getting Started

To get started with Piazza, see Piazza - Getting Started with Piazza [UW-Madison]

Additional Resources

See Also

Results: 1-10 of 10

No.Document TitleIDUpdatedViews
1Piazza - Getting Started with Piazza [UW-Madison]1219652026-03-046248
2Piazza - Overview [UW-Madison]305022025-08-0745040
3Learn@UW - Service Status Pages for Learn@UW Tools [UW-Madison]992002025-08-075049
4Managing Student Questions with Piazza — Description1143282025-06-173219
5Creating a Classroom Backchannel with Piazza1047972025-06-174764
6Piazza - Roster Sync with LTI 1.3 [UW-Madison]1235602025-04-103406
7Piazza - Enabling Piazza in Canvas [UW-Madison]1488042025-03-041238
8Piazza - How to Get Help [UW-Madison]305562024-01-0215088
9Piazza - Create a Piazza Account [UW-Madison]637362023-12-1522731
10Piazza Accessibility and Usability Information1150272025-12-293564

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