Company Introduces Piazza Student Quads to Help Students Share the Platform This Fall
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA - August 25, 2011 - Piazza, the online Q&A platform for students and instructors, today announced key metrics that attest to the remarkable demand for its academic collaboration platform. The company has experienced explosive growth, with the number of classes created in the month of July alone exceeding the total number created in the 2011 Spring quarter. Additionally, the number of schools using Piazza’s free, online collaboration platform increased 100 percent last month over the combined first five months of the year. Since its public availability nine months ago, Piazza now has over 2,500 instructors using its platform across hundreds of schools.
Piazza is a free online collaboration platform that allows students and instructors to help each other quickly find high-quality answers to difficult questions. No download or installation is required to access Piazza. Members spend two-to-four hours each night collaborating with their classmates.
“When we developed Piazza, we envisioned a platform that could transform and enrich students’ academic experiences and achievements, and we are thrilled that students, professors, and TAs have adopted it so readily,” said Pooja (Nath) Sankar, Piazza’s Founder & CEO. “We’re continuing to grow at a rapid pace and pleased to report that our platform achieved 10x increase in faculty adoption just since the end of January.”
The company also today announced Piazza Student Quads -- school-specific home pages that enable students to browse classes already using Piazza while also banding together students’ requests that new instructors start using it for their respective classes. When enough students request a class, Piazza automatically e-mails the instructor explaining the students’ interest in the platform. Having a critical mass of students not only adds weight to the request, it also ensures that class discussions will be lively and engaging because there are enough students participating.
“Using Piazza for my Intro to Computer class was a life saver because I was able to communicate real time with my classmates to collectively solve massively complicated problems,” said Jon Lexa, a senior at UCLA and president of the school’s Cognitive Science Society. “I’m excited that Student Quads will show me all of the classes that are using Piazza this term. When I’m choosing which courses to take, that will definitely factor into my decision.”
“We’ve been amazed by how much student engagement we’ve seen on Piazza, with students spending hours a night working together. We built Student Quads to channel some of that enthusiasm to the campus at large, so as many people as possible can benefit from a safe, collaborative environment when their fall term opens,” said Philip Soffer, Piazza’s Vice President of Operations.
The Piazza phenomenon is not confined to traditional universities. Piazza has also been embraced by organizations striving to broaden access to quality instruction. The CK-12 Foundation, which seeks to make high-quality content available for free to students, teachers, and schools, is using Piazza to connect instructors for curriculum refinement. In a similar fashion, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will be piloting Piazza this fall at 27 community colleges to improve the teaching of mathematics and to connect instructors who are working with the foundation on the development of a math curriculum.
“We’re very pleased with the role we’re playing in the broadening of access to education,” said Sankar. “That’s core to Piazza’s founding mission, and it is very gratifying to see adoption not just at elite research universities, but everywhere people are teaching and learning.”
Founded in 2009, Piazza is a free, online collaboration platform for students and teachers to communicate about complex problems in real time. Anyone can create a class at Piazza.com to initiate classmate discussion. Students spend on average two-to-four hours a night on Piazza working together with classmates and instructors to find the answers they need at the time they need them. Piazza is FERPA-compliant and used in hundreds of colleges and universities.
For more information, please go to piazza.com.
GMK Communications for Piazza
Jennifer Henderson
650-224-7676
jennifer@gmkcommunications.com