Professor Steve Wolfman on Creating a Cohesive Community for Students on Piazza
Professor Steve Wolfman of the University of British Columbia on using a student-run Piazza as a place to create a long term space for students and alumni to build knowledge and a supportive community.
Student-run Piazza classes allows for students to support each other through their degree
One way we are trying to reinforce a cohesive sense of community among students is by having a student-run Piazza board. This Piazza class is run by two students that we hire as tutors. Typically what will happen is someone will post an advising question, maybe anonymously, and oftentimes another student will jump in and answer it right away, and I can just quickly endorse the answer. This helps with the advising load from my perspective, but also for the students to get to know each other, to help each other and support themselves through the degree.
Create blog-like posts to share useful information
A student tutor started what she called the “Read Me”, which is essentially a blog where she and her co-tutor would post little stories. The first were about a tool in computing that might be useful to computer science students. From there it really started to branch out. Another post addressed: “You’re really struggling in the course, you’re not sure you’re going to do as well as you want to, and the exam is coming up. What should you do. What kind of strategies should you pursue.” That was really valuable to a ton of students and we actually have reposted that post or brought it back to the top of the feed so students see it again.
Share stories of experience to overcome imposter syndrome and build connection
Another post that was really amazing was on imposter syndrome in computer science, which I’m sure other disciplines struggle with as well. In CS, a lot of us come into the discipline and feel like everybody else knows what they are doing, and maybe we don’t feel like we know what we are doing and maybe we don’t belong there. This is especially common for women or racialized minorities in computer science, as far as the research seems to show. So this student posted about being that person who felt that imposter syndrome, and it was very powerful and I think helped a lot of students to see that that experience was not unique to them. It was actually really powerful to me as well because this is a student who I was really excited about bringing into the program because she was such a strong candidate, and here she felt like she didn’t belong.
Pin important information so it is visible for the long term
Another way that we see a lot of value in the student Piazza board is that we can take particularly important posts and pin them for the long term. A good example of that is we had a couple of tutors go through every course they would commonly get questions about and created a resource page as a Piazza post and pinning it to the top of the Q&A feed. By pinning that as a Piazza post meant that in the long-term each tutor can go back to that post and edit it and update with new materials, and other students could then also contribute and ask followup questions, and that drove it to become a better and better resource.
What’s common in all of these is Piazza is really helping create a long term space for our students and our alumni as well to build knowledge, but also a supportive community, a place where they can feel like they are getting in touch with each other, especially right now in the middle of the pandemic.
