Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Piazza as a Q&A tool for large classes

https://piazza.com

Communication with students for outside-of-the-classroom information flows doesn't scale well if the tools are one-to-one. Email is particularly bad, as students don't see the answers to similar questions asked by their classmates.

My experiences with Piazza show those problems to be largely solved. Piazza is an online tool where students ask questions, where TAs/Professors _and other students_ can answer those questions, and where all students can see the answers. A bevy of associated, simple tools are bundled into the site to allow announcements, polls, indicating importance and correctness of answers, cross-referencing answers and collecting statistics.

I will bring a computer with large monitor to show Summit participants how I use Piazza in my 90 to 120 student classes. I will demonstrate with past-semester content, illustrating student usage patterns, staff response metrics and the simplicity of setting up and using Piazza.

Nace, Bill
CIT, ECE