Thank you for Piazza! It has been an excellent resource for our new introductory biology courses here at Yale. Piazza is a great forum for those students who are too shy to ask questions in class and who post anonymously - and then this benefits all the students who read the answers. Plus, I have had students say that they love how quickly their questions get answered, instead of waiting for office hours or the next lecture.
Surjit Chandhoke — Biology
Piazza is the state of the art for online classroom discussions. My students and I experimented with numerous leading systems over several weeks. Piazza won hands-down. In fact, my students preferred it so much we ended the comparative experiment early, on humanitarian grounds.
Bob Neer — History
Piazza is easy to learn, easy to enroll students in a flash, and the payback is enormous: imagine students answering other student's questions, and when you answer, it may only have to be once for the entire class. Piazza is a better way to make critical class announcements on media that reaches them immediately where they live (phone, tablet, computer) without taking up lecture time in the classroom.
Nathan Collie — Biology
Piazza is the most efficient way for students to ask questions, to get answers, and to learn by helping others. It is a reliable, searchable, easy to use, organizable tool for interactive student learning. And the icing on the cake: the staff is very responsive, helpful, and creative.
Amy Gottfried — Chemistry
I used Piazza in a very small class last spring to see how it worked. Even though the class was small Piazza provided benefits to the students particularly when they were working on some challenging homework problems. They were able to figure out among themselves what the critical questions were, and make suggestions about how to proceed. I really enjoyed the collaborative atmosphere that Piazza supported, and felt that the exchanges that the students had via Piazza, helped them be more prepared and confident in classroom discussions.
Presley Martin — Biology
I've explored a number of courseware products developed by various startups and other universities, but Piazza has so far been the only one that feels like it was built by people who actually care about our problems and understand how to solve them.
Andrey Liscovich — Economics
I used it in PHYS 212 and it was extremely helpful as an unofficial course website since our official website is so out of date that simple things like posting files is a pain. The flexibility of Piazza allowed me to create a weekly guide to activities (a "pin"ned note) that not only told the students what the activities were but also how they fit together. And I could post all relevant course materials as attachments on that note. So this was extremely helpful.
Stephen Van Hook — Physics
Discussion tools need to be nearly perfect (in terms of ease-of-use and functionality) to entice people to actually use them, and Piazza is the closest-to-perfect tool that I've seen for online discussion.
Kenneth Norman — Psychology
Piazza is an amazing way to keep tabs on the pulse of your class. Student posts give me timely feedback on what concepts need clarification, provide live feedback during in-class group activities, communicate issues about how we run the course and why, and allow students to share science finds in articles or videos. I've found some great teaching material in articles and videos. The additional bonus is how much lighter my e-mail inbox is for BIOL 1510.
Chrissy Spencer — Biology
Piazza is very nice, my students are enjoying it. I particularly like being able to use LaTex commands to display the mathematical formulas. We hold on-line review sessions before every test, and it's much neater than the whiteboard options.
Klara Grodzinsky — Mathematics
We were very happy with Piazza in CS 142 so I'd give it a strong positive recommendation. It's easy-to-use, the students really enjoyed it (particularly in comparison to the newsgroup approach we used in previous offerings of the class), it was reliable, and the course staff liked it. We'll definitely use it again.
John Ousterhout — Computer Science
Piazza provides a convenient and user-friendly platform for holding online class discussions, answering questions, making announcements, and posting course materials. Piazza makes it incredibly easy for me to communicate with my students outside of the classroom.
Sean Laraway — Psychology
Unlike many of the presentation software options, Piazza is constantly innovating to find effective ways of communicating information. I really value these efforts, because so much about the educational environment is changing so quickly, it is great to have a partner in there trying to figure things out with you. As for the qualities of what they have done, well the features speak for themselves.
Jarrod Hayes — International Affairs
Piazza has become the single source of truth about all our course-related information. I've never seen a tool that so directly hits the nail on the head in terms of every information-flow problem I've been struggling with for the 19 years I've been teaching.
Dan Garcia — Computer Science
Piazza has been a wonderful tool to use. Nearly 100% of my students have signed up, and at least 75% use it every week. Amazing! Several students have taken the lead in answering other students' questions which has been great for reducing my e-mail load in this large class and also creating good opportunities for the better students to test themselves by teaching. I also love that there is LaTeX support.
Benjamin Antieau — Mathematics
I’ve tried discussion boards before, but they’ve never worked. Piazza did. Out of my 80 students, 50 were frequent contributors, and all of them were at least “listeners.” Honestly, I don’t know how I would get along without it.
Beth Ingram — Economics
Piazza helps me focus my time supporting my students with homework and assignments as its highly likely that a student may have similar questions. I can also say my inbox is more streamlined, I love the dashboard that lets me know how quickly I am responding to students, I use the iPhone app so my stats are within 68 minutes so I think that is really very cool.
Robyn Raschke — Accounting
Piazza is a nice auxiliary meeting-place (as the name implies!). I let the students use it themselves, which they do plenty, and the TA and I will chime in with occasional hints.
Lorenzo Sadun — Mathematics
Piazza has proven to be an ideal forum for my class. Compared to conventional bulletin boards, the design makes it much easier for students to find relevant posts, and for my staff and me to keep track of outstanding questions. On top of this, the folks at Piazza have been wonderfully supportive and very responsive to our needs.
Greg Morrisett — Computer Science
Piazza is more than a class management system. It's design makes discussion between my students very natural. I am able to understand at a glance any misconceptions or problems students are having which allows me to offer immediate feedback that facilitates learning. Thanks for being so responsive to my students requests!
Amy Wagler — Mathematics
I have used Piazza with two different large-enrollment biology courses at Yale. We have had high participation in the site, with many students asking questions and many students answering each others' questions. Piazza has been a valuable way for me to see what issues are confusing to the students, and I have really enjoyed posting answers. Especially in larger courses, in which students can have little direct interaction with the professor, having this further mechanism for dialog with the students is really great.
Michael Koelle — Biology
Piazza was suggested to me by a new colleague. I am very thankful to him. I used to explain the same kind of questions over and over by email. Now, if I find that a question is of general interest, I can direct the student to post that question on piazza and then my answer helps out possibly hundreds of students. Secondly, I found that Piazza created a positive dynamic among my students. Homework problems were discussed between the students, and this showed me that they were taken more seriously. Students would give each other hints on how to attack certain problems. Students were careful not to give away the solution, but to give meaningful advice. I enjoyed watching these conversations and rarely had to post things myself.
Anton Betten — Mathematics
Piazza helps me organize and respond to student's questions in my class. This not only saves considerable time, but also helps to keep the questions and answers conceptually organized for me, the TAs, and the class. The students like to help each other and contribute their own ideas, anonymously if they prefer.
Steve Van Hooser — Brandeis University, Biology