Once upon a time, before the pandemic (seems like a lifetime ago but just yesterday), I used Piazza for my course communication. I have never been a fan of managing student communications via email. I don’t know about everyone else, but I get dozens of emails everyday that aren’t from students. In an effort to ensure that I don’t miss any of my students’ very important emails, I decided to use a discussion board format. Piazza was the first tool I used and kept using it until it became a paid service.
Piazza is a wonderful tool. It’s easy for students to sign up and have access to class conversations. Students can post questions and receive answers from other students or the instructors. It allows you organize questions into folders. I used it to organize questions by assessment type (i.e., homework, project, labs, etc.). Students also have the ability to either post to the instructor or entire class. I also used the resources feature in some of my classes. I would post files that I needed to share that were an issue via Canvas (or Blackboard at the time). I never used the polling feature, but it’s there (lol). The best part is that there’s an app! I loved that I could communicate with students directly from my phone, and got immediate alerts.
I loved Piazza and would have kept using it if it weren’t for those pesky fees. I switched to Ed Discussion which is very similar in features but no app 🙁