Leading Social Learning Platform Piazza Launches Live Q&A in Response to a Surge in Online Learning Demand
Student engagement rises 63% as record number of courses have been added to the Piazza platform over the past month
Piazza, the premier social learning platform, announced Piazza Live Q&A, providing a new dedicated space in Piazza courses for students to easily ask and upvote questions in real time as instructors are running their classes. Live Q&A also adds a new dimension to virtual office hours or any other environment where instructors want to monitor students’ progress and understanding throughout their teaching segments. The immediate adoption of Live Q&A and significant increase in student engagement in beta tests suggests that the novel learning solutions implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic may result in large scale changes to the traditional classroom well after students return to campus.
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“We accelerated our plans to enhance our platform because the demand for real-time interaction in a comprehensive learning suite is overwhelming, both among students and instructors,” said Piazza founder and CEO, Pooja Sankar.
Piazza Live Q&A was developed in response to the recent surge in online learning as Piazza has secured a large number of new system-wide integrations and contracts with universities, ranging from Ivy League institutions to large state schools, including U.S. and global deployments. Since March 1st, more than 36% of courses added on the platform in the last year have been created within the past month, and engagement has soared 63% over a typical month, with existing classes relying on Piazza even more as all students shift to virtual learning.
“Universities and schools in the U.S. and throughout the world have been forced to contend with a new reality as they try to educate students in the midst of a pandemic,” said Piazza founder and CEO, Pooja Sankar. “We accelerated our plans to enhance our platform because the demand for real-time interaction in a comprehensive learning suite is overwhelming, both among students and instructors. Delivering this capability in an intelligent and engaging way will forever change the way courses are taught. Once students return to campus, the days of raising their hands in class, which can be very intimidating, will be over as real-time feedback becomes the norm.”
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To make the online experience feel more like a “regular” classroom, particularly for students and instructors who are not used to online course delivery, Piazza designed Live Q&A to serve as a smart equivalent to students raising their hands. Because the Piazza platform gives students the ability to upvote questions, essentially pooling inquiries in an efficient manner, instructors instantly see what’s most important and where students are struggling so that they can adjust their lesson or lecture accordingly or follow up with supplemental material after class. As a result, online teaching and collaboration become more natural and customized to the level of understanding of students actively involved in the class, fostering a more engaging learning experience for students that is also informative for professors, TAs, and teachers who want to know how well material is being received.
“In filming my class this semester, it was easy for student interaction to become stilted early on, which has long been a problem with virtual learning. In-class techniques like polls help, but they sometimes slow down the pace of the class,” said Emmett Witchel, professor of computer science at UT Austin. “Piazza’s ability to power real-time upvoting will hit a sweet spot, helping me to respond to students quickly to keep them involved and engaged. I predict this feature will be very popular in the current distance learning climate.”
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