Professor Success Stories

I’ve been using iclickers for seven or eight years, and that’s a technology that takes a lot of time. It can also go wrong, and it’s a big nuisance when it does. I have a part-time person hired just to do the record-keeping! But Piazza is not like that at all. It’s largely invisible. You make a few decisions when you set it up and then it’s pretty straightforward—not time-consuming, energy-draining, anything like that.

Well, here at Berkeley we’re close to Silicon Valley, so we’re used to trying new things. But I was a little bit worried about being flooded with emails and notifications. It just hasn’t turned out that way at all, though. Piazza has been totally nonintrusive. I was able to choose how frequently I receive emails—I chose every four hours or something. So I very much like that feature.

Well, I had been communicating with students through my own website, which was a pain in the neck. My class had a lot of downloads and generated a lot of student feedback, and I was doing things through mechanisms that were not really intended to be used the way I was using them. But in the last few years, Piazza has replaced my entire website, which is now dormant. I post homework assignments, lecture slides, demonstration code, all that stuff on Piazza, and answer students’ questions. It really has been a big change in terms of organization. I don’t have to wonder, Did I post that homework properly? Did I answer all those emails? I can also find out very rapidly if students aren't understanding a particular concept, and either post a detailed explanation on Piazza or cover it in a lecture.

I use only Piazza for my class communication in both directions. The one exception is if a student has...

I have 500 students. I can’t fit that many people into any room on campus. There is no amount of office hours that would allow me to connect with them all. Many of the students who ask questions on Piazza just wouldn't get the opportunity to ask them otherwise. Maybe they couldn’t make it to office hours; maybe they didn't get the chance to talk to a TA because it was so crowded in class. Now they can get answers to their questions 24 hours a day online. Hundreds of them are using Piazza. Some read every post on there—I see them having ‘post feuds’ (laughs). So they enjoy it. They definitely take advantage of it.

Yes, I’m teaching it with the same university in Sweden, though I’m actually looking for a few other partners, too. I want to expand this model. I could never imagine teaching this class in a classroom again. It would just be too boring.

The great thing about Piazza is it's very light, very text-based. And the students found it very easy to understand and to use. It structured our class discussion. There is no other software platform I'm aware of that would make that easy to do. If people are actually actively engaged in it, and it's a part of their syllabus, then it can be quite powerful. In fact, then it can be way more powerful than classroom discussions alone. I was disappointed to discover that not many professors in the humanities used it.

There are two key differences: First, the piazza platform is very intuitive to use so it’s easy for TAs and students to start using it right away. Second, I also really like the ‘wiki’ format where everyone contributes to one common answer – this is what really saves time because...