Colleges and Universities Select the Piazza Q&A Platform for Enhanced Virtual Learning

Enhancements focused on accessibility for students with specific needs and expanded admin controls for enrollment management, roster synchronization, usage metrics, and grade book integrations

Piazza, the premier social learning platform, today announced tremendous growth metrics, which underscore the value of its service amid the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Piazza course enrollments increased by more than four times in 2020 than that of the previous year, and time a student spends on the platform jumped to an average of 4.5 hours a day. Post views on the Piazza platform exceeded 1.2 billion in 2020. Thirty thousand new classes have been added to the platform since the pandemic hit in March of 2020. The company introduced a slew of new features over the past several months to increase engagement, helping both instructors and students get the most out of their classes.

As Piazza has focused on scaling to meet the steep increase in demand, it has also furthered its platform innovation and added new features requested by instructors. Piazza has recently entered into several new paid enterprise agreements with the nation’s top colleges, universities and research institutions, including Georgia Tech University, University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and multiple Ivy League schools.

“COVID-19 fundamentally changed the nature and expectations associated with teaching and learning,” said Piazza Founder and CEO Pooja Sankar. “The pressure has been on universities and instructors to demonstrate value to students who may not be able to learn in the traditional setting due to the pandemic. This is where Piazza has been able to step up. We’ve worked relentlessly to create optimal learning experiences, responding to requests and needs through product development so that instructors and students can get the most out of their classes, no matter the environment.”

Piazza has helped professors streamline conversations to address the most pressing questions that students have. Recent additions to the popular platform include Live Q&A, Duplicate Post Detection, enhanced participation analytics as well as discipline-specific advances like improved discussion experiences for humanities and added support for Chemistry notation.

Broadening Accessibility for Students and Expanding Admin Controls 

As Piazza furthers its relationships with universities, it has also committed to scaling its platform to meet the increasingly nuanced demands and needs of its university customers. In the year ahead, the company is working to roll out critical enhancements focused on accessibility for those students with specific needs who require, particularly in a remote environment, added support when on-campus resources are not available to them. Also, Piazza will provide expanded admin controls that simplify enrollment management, roster synchronization, and the ability to capture usage metrics, with SAML/SSO and adhering to LTI 1.3 specification.

Piazza has been used by more than 5 million students and over 100,000 professors from 2,000 schools in 90 countries worldwide, and instruction has expanded from STEM to all disciplines.

For details on purchasing a license and to see a list of universities that have purchased a license, visit our license page. To learn more about Piazza’s platform visit: www.piazza.com.

About Piazza

Piazza Q&A is the premier social learning platform today, helping more than 5 million students learn beyond the traditional classroom in more than 2,000 universities spanning 90 countries. Students from all disciplines use Piazza to work together collaboratively despite differences in learning levels, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, and instructors address their questions as they arise. While Piazza Q&A enables inclusive learning, the Piazza Network opens up career opportunities. Students in the Piazza community can opt-in to join the Network, where they can connect with potential employers as well as interact with other students in their network for career advice. Universities work with Piazza to license the Piazza Q&A platform across departments or institution wide.

To learn more about all that Piazza offers, please visit www.piazza.com.