The past few years have been an exciting period of growth and iteration at Piazza. We’ve been hard at work improving our back-end to provide for a more stable user experience amid evolving needs of site reliability and scalability. With a 99.99% uptime, students can rely on Piazza, even on those late-night study sessions.
All the while, Piazza continues to grow in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. Piazza has been able to reach over five million students in 90 countries around the world. Over the past few months we’ve been collaborating with professors to get comprehensive feedback on enhancements and new features to add to our Q&A platform. We’re eager to show you what we’ve been up to and to shed some light on what’s new with Piazza!
Duplicate Post Detection
As class sizes continue to grow, professors and their teaching staff need better ways to efficiently handle student contributions. We’re extremely excited to introduce duplicate post detection, which limits students from creating repetitive posts that normally clutter the Q&A feed and take away from the learning experience. With duplicate post detection, students will be prompted with a list of existing posts that might be similar to their question, note, or poll. This helps students ensure that their questions have not been asked by their classmates, and quickly redirects them to already published answers.
On top of preventing duplicate posts, users should see improved search functionality across the platform. When students are able to find answers to commonly asked questions faster, the Q&A feed becomes free of repetitive posts, in turn resulting in significantly less overhead for course staff.
Duplicate Post Detection is enabled by default in classes with more than 100 students and can be toggled at any time via the Manage Class tab. We strive to make Piazza a better pedagogical resource for classes of all sizes and expect this feature to greatly ease the headache of managing large courses.
Improved Controls over Student Activity
In many of our feedback discussions, we heard the need for instructors to have increased control over the content students’ posts in their course, as well as more granular control over individual student’s activity on the platform. We want to continue to support an environment where productive and safe learning can happen, and have implemented the ability for instructors to disable certain student’s ability to post in a class for a designated period of time.
Should a student post homework or exam solutions accidentally, or create inappropriate and unproductive posts, an instructor can select Ban User Console to select a student and revoke posting privileges.
Endorse Followups
Oftentimes the most illuminating discussion appears outside of the official answer section of a question or in response to a poll or note. Course staff will now be able to endorse contributions made in the followup section of a post. We wanted instructors to be able to easily highlight these contributions and award the participating students as they could for a post or an answer.
In-Depth Course Participation Data
Course instructors are now able to download an up-to-date breakdown of class participation data in the form of JSON/CSV files. The data in these files are an excellent resource for reviewing learning analytics and conducting pedagogical research. Instructors have used these records to adapt their teaching practices to maximize student engagement and retention, particularly among students from underrepresented backgrounds. This data provides an excellent foundation for more efficiently assigning participation grades, and can also aid in sourcing Teaching Assistants for future iterations of the course.
Piazza Network Updates
(To read a more comprehensive article about how and why we started the Piazza Network, see our recent blog post on Medium.)
Our team recently created two new web pages detailing the Piazza Network to help instructors understand our recruiting platform and provide more transparency:
- An overview about the Piazza Network: piazza.com/piazzanetwork
- A list of frequently asked questions: piazza.com/piazzanetworkfaq
We also added the ability for instructors to configure Piazza Network settings for their class to best match what their students need:
- A new private post that instructors can choose to post to their class on Piazza so that instructors and students alike can more easily learn about the opportunities offered to students on the Piazza Network.
- Instructors can help their students get discovered by companies by associating key terms with their courses such as object-oriented programming or DNA sequencing. This can give potential employers a better understanding of what skills students who have joined the Piazza Network have acquired from taking a particular class.
- We have also added a new setting to disable top student badges if instructors do not wish to have their endorsements appear on student profiles on the Piazza Network.
Other things you may have missed
Support for Markdown
By popular demand, we’ve added improved support for Markdown. Users can now simply type markdown with <md></md> tags in our plain text editor. In our rich text editor, we’ve added an additional button that lets users type markdown, in addition to support for file attachments and video embedding as well as STEM favorites such as LaTeX equation editing and Code Blocks.
Drafts Folder — We have made it easier to access saved drafts by adding a Drafts section to the folder bar.
Automatic Add/Drop — Instructors can more easily access our add/drop setting in the Manage Class tab when enrolling students on Piazza. This setting allows for quick enrollment updates by adding any new students from an uploaded roster and dropping the students that have been removed.
Disable History — We made it easier for instructors to disable the history bar located above posts. This prevents students from being able to view previous iterations of a post.
Post Referencing — We’ve made it easier for students and instructors to reference other posts in the feed by typing an ‘@’ symbol followed by the relevant post’s ID, e.g., ‘@105.’
Converting Private Posts to Anonymous Public Posts — We’ve added tooltips so instructors know they can change private posts to anonymous public posts if they believe that the content would be beneficial for the entire class. Student names will automatically be anonymized when the note is posted to the rest of the class.
We’ve been busy! In addition to the above, instructors should now have an easier time seeing real-time updates to their courses’ Q&A feeds with improved browser refresh mechanism. We’ve developed a more secure LTI functionality to better integrate Piazza into their campus’ preferred Learning Management System. We’ve also improved access to Piazza from mobile devices with our updated Android and iOS apps. Piazza maintains a commitment to inclusion and we’ve continued to improve the accessibility of our site through Piazza Lite. We have also been working diligently to ensure that your data and privacy remain secure in compliance with FERPA and the GDPR. Piazza will be fully CCPA compliant by January 1st, 2020.
We are always looking for ways to further our mission of creating more inclusive and efficient learning spaces for all. Don’t hesitate to reach out to productfeedback@piazza.com to let us know how we’re doing.
Stay up to date with other exciting features coming to the platform: Piazza Q&A updates.
P.S.: We’d love to send you some fun Piazza laptop stickers to get students excited about using the platform — shoot a note to team@piazza.com with your address and we’ll ship them to you!
