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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