Piazza: Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd

Abstract

Large undergraduate courses 300 to 1000+ can be time consuming administratively. Teaching staff receive numerous emails from students on both content and administrative matters. Often the same questions are asked by different students. In addition to the time spent replying individually to students, there is often a considerable delay in responding. The provision of increased resources to students, such as frequently asked questions and detailed instructions on a wide range of administrative issues in coursebooks and learning management systems does not appear to cut down the volume of email traffic. To counter the numbers of emails and also provide more timely responses to questions, the Department of Commercial Law at The University of Auckland trialed Piazza, a web based tool. Piazza works essentially as a question and answer web service. It has been described as a cross between a wiki and a forum. Staff can post announcements and resources, ask questions of the class, conduct polls and a range of other things. The real value in Piazza, however, is that students can ask questions and other students and staff are able to answer those questions. While other learning management systems have discussion boards and the like, Piazza allows student and staff to edit the answers of others resulting in more timely, accurate and accessible answers.