Free online class discussions spread by popular demand


Professors can confirm student answers are correct on Piazza.com.

College students on 900 campuses are taking a grassroots approach to online class discussions, using a popular new platform to create web-based gatherings and prompting their professors to join the real-time back-and-forth.

The website, Piazza.com, was first used for a few courses at Stanford University last year as a counter to the top-down approach of universities’ learning management systems (LMS) software, such as Blackboard.

Campus officials often sign contracts with giant LMS companies, giving students little or no choice about how they’ll interact with classmates and instructors online.

Pooja Sankar, a recent graduate of Stanford’s MBA program and creator of Piazza.com, said professors nationwide have responded to student demand to join the website and start real-time online conversations about class assignments, lectures, and upcoming quizzes and exams.

“We’ve really seen a critical mass form among a lot of colleges that use the site,” said Sankar, a native of India who came to the U.S. at age 22 after finishing a degree at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. “It’s important for the instructor to know that there is a lot of demand out there, that many of their students want to use [Piazza.com] and engage in the question-and-answer process.”

A college student can create a free Piazza account and join groups from any class he or she is taking during the current semester. Each class site has recent questions aligned on the left of the screen, with answers and follow-up discussion posted in the middle of the screen.

Piazza.com could also help professors, instructors, and teaching assistants better understand which concepts need more explanation in online discussions or in the lecture hall.

Unanswered student questions are highlighted in red on a class’s Piazza site, and instructors can change and delete previously entered, incorrect answers posted by students. The site also highlights “hot topics” that receive questions from many students throughout a day or week.

Students can participate in class discussions anonymously only if the professor hasn’t disallowed that function on the course site. And students can trust answers to class questions because each instructor can endorse correct answers.

Sankar, 31, dubbed the website a “social Q&A” platform that will appeal to Facebook and Twitter-savvy college students accustomed to instant collaboration.

Educators hesitant to endorse a website that could lead to cheating between students finishing homework assignments, for example, should remember that interactions on Piazza.com are among the least secretive students can have via the web.

“Some professors are concerned, and I understand that,” Sankar said. “But this is actually much more open than other forms of [electronic] communication, like IM or eMail. That’s just two-way communication that the professor never sees.”

The demand for Piazza class sites can be seen in a YouTube video in which a Stanford professor concedes to students’ request for a Piazza course platform at the start of the spring 2011 semester.

Sankar said that when Piazza was new on the Stanford campus, she would watch class groups grow and eMail professors and teaching assistants to tell them how many students had begun their question-and-answer sessions on the site.

“A lot of times, within minutes, the professor would join,” she said.

Srini Devadas, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement that his course’s Piazza group has ensured teaching assistants “spend significantly less time answering repetitious questions from students, or correcting simple errors.”

“Now they can spend more time helping me create new material for the class,” he said.

Piazza has proven useful not just for answering pressing student questions before lectures and exams, but also in helping educators respond to complaints for college students with busy social schedules.

Charles Leiserson, another MIT computer science professor, said a student recently complained on Piazza that Leiserson’s take-home exam coincided with an event at the student’s fraternity house.

Leiserson said that before he could respond to the fraternity member’s complaint, computer science classmates told the student to “stop whining, that there’s plenty of time for the exam if they only budget their time, that all students have conflicts during the term.”

“In the past, I’ve always had to respond myself, drawing a fine line between being understanding and telling the student to be reasonable,” Leiserson said. “With Piazza, the complaining student’s peers did this work for me.”

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