Type Private | Industry Education, SaaS Founded 2009 | |
Key people Pooja Nath Sankar, CEO and Founder Headquarters Palo Alto, California, United States | ||
Piazza is a Q&A web service. It can be described as "mixture between a wiki and a forum" that can be used with learning management systems. The word Piazza comes from the Italian word for plaza — a common city square where people can come together to share ideas and knowledge.
Contents
History
Pooja Sankar created the first prototype of Piazza in 2009. By February 2010, Piazza was used by approximately 600 Stanford students. In January 2011, Piazza opened to all institutions, reaching over 330 schools and tens of thousands of students by the summer of the same year.
While the service originally operated under the name 'Piazzza', in June 2011, the third 'z' was dropped from Piazza's name.
Funding
Service
Users can publicly (and anonymously, if the head instructor allows it) ask questions, answer questions, and post notes. Each question prompts a collective answer to which any user can contribute and an instructor answer, shown directly below, which can only be edited by instructors. Users are allowed to attach external files to posts, use LaTeX formatting, view a post's edit history, add follow-up questions, and receive email notifications when new content is added. The interface consists of a dynamic list of posts on the left side of the screen, a central panel for viewing and contributing to individual posts, and an upper bar for account control. According to the company's data, the average Piazza question is answered within 14 minutes.
Individual Piazza classes are self-contained and can be locked with an access code. Anyone may create a class, but the head instructor retains full control over the class content, along with administrative abilities such as endorsing good answers and viewing more detailed statistics on class activity.
The Piazza team is based in Palo Alto, California.