Piazza, the premier social learning platform, today announced the launch of the Piazza Q&A App in Microsoft AppSource. The Piazza Q&A platform brings unique capability to Teams, rounding out a complete suite of education tools for instructors in a single environment. With more schools and universities supporting classes online in response to COVID-19, the coupling of Piazza and Teams adds streamlined workflows for educators, making their transition and ongoing delivery of virtual courses easier.
“As educators continue to navigate and evolve their courses through a virtual setting, it is important to provide them access to a robust set of tools in one place that they can leverage to deliver a seamless online learning experience for students,” said Pooja Sankar, founder and CEO of Piazza. “To meet the expanding communication needs of educators, we are excited to make Piazza available in Microsoft Teams to allow educators to complement Piazza’s discussion capabilities with Teams’ video functionality for live lectures and chat feature for one-off communication.”
“I am thrilled to see Piazza integrated into Microsoft Teams. Until now, there was no other app out there that provides forum functionality with Microsoft Teams. Piazza is a wonderful medium for people to share information,” said Eric Edlund, Assistant Professor of Physics, SUNY Cortland. “I am looking forward to using this for one of my online classes, so that students can post questions about individual homework problems. You can’t reasonably organize a conversation in an ordinary chat window, you need to have topics and threads, which Piazza does wonderfully.”
Piazza and Teams Provide Easy Access to Help Educators Everywhere
Instructors are now able to access their Piazza classrooms through a single sign-on process available via Teams.
“We are pleased to welcome Piazza Q&A to Microsoft Teams, adding to the exceptional instructional solutions we offer our ecosystem of educators and academic partners,” said Dan Ayoub, general manager of education at Microsoft. “At a time when education is experiencing tremendous upheaval, Piazza brings new and timely capabilities to Teams’ suite of tools, so more students and instructors across the world can stay connected and engaged in a virtual classroom or course environment.”
Piazza was founded to help computer science and STEM students by providing them with an intellectually safe space to ask questions and interact with instructors and students. It has since expanded to work with top U.S. academic institutions and departments outside of STEM-related disciplines as well as select high schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The move to make Piazza Q&A available with Teams is the latest example of Piazza’s commitment to meeting the needs of the education community. Just last month, Piazza debuted its Live Q&A dedicated space for students to ask and upvote questions in real time as instructors run their classes, making it easier for educators to gauge student understanding of material as students benefit from an experience that more closely mimics the “regular” classroom.
To access the Piazza Q&A platform with Teams, go to Microsoft AppSourcestore.
To see how to get started adding Piazza to Teams, view this support page.
About Piazza
Piazza Q&A is the premier social learning platform today, helping more than 5 million students learn beyond the traditional classroom in more than 2,000 universities spanning 90 countries. Students from all disciplines use Piazza to work together collaboratively despite differences in learning levels, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, and instructors address their questions as they arise. While Piazza Q&A enables inclusive learning, the Piazza Network opens up career opportunities. Any student in the Piazza community can opt-in to join the Network, where they can connect with potential employers as well as interact with other students in their network for career advice. Employers sign up to interact with students. Revenue from employers keeps Piazza Q&A free for students and professors while offering students unique access to career and networking opportunities.
To learn more about all that Piazza offers, please visit www.piazza.com.
To learn more about the Piazza Network, please visit www.piazza.com/piazzanetwork.
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