Faculty who are familiar with Piazza might set up a Piazza class to showcase the platform to attendees of a conference such as SIGCSE, or of a teaching & learning event such as Economics Network Symposium. This can be a great way to highlight features that are specific to Piazza (e.g. polls, instructor notes, student wiki answers and instructor endorsements on student answers, student participation statistics, organization of discussions by topic) that one cannot get with mailing lists, Facebook groups, or chat channels.
These faculty will set up a Piazza class ahead of the event and enroll faculty who are attending the event, either as fellow “instructors” to the class, or as “students”, depending on their use case. During the event, they demonstrate how to set up a Piazza class, how to add students to a class, and provide examples of how they use Piazza to foster student interaction and learning in their own classrooms. This allows their colleagues to become familiar with the Piazza interface and functionality, and encourages colleagues to adopt Piazza for their classes.
Faculty might also set up a Piazza class to discuss actual topics related to the conference. They configure folders to map to topics that will be covered at the conference. They add a welcome note and post a couple notes/polls to kick off a dialogue among attendees of the conference.
Tips to get started:
- For this use case, it is common to create a new school when creating your class. An example of school name that is not affiliated to any particular university might be "SIGCSE". Check the box "My school does not have its own email domain" when creating a new school.
- Some faculty will choose to create a class affiliated with their particular university. When creating your class this way, you can set an access code later, so faculty do not need a university-specific email address when enrolling in your class.
- Next, create a class to reflect your event and use case. An example of course name might be "SIGSCE Topics 2021"
- If you'd like for the class to live on for several terms, select term 'Other' when selecting academic term.
- From your 'Manage Class' page, enroll conference organizers as "instructors" to the class; instructor self-signup is usually disabled for this class.
- If you prefer to manage student enrollment to this class, you can enroll fellow conference attendees as "students" via 'Manage Class' page. Scroll to the 'Manage Enrollment' section of this page to add attendee emails or upload a conference attendee roster.
You can then set an access code that you do not hand out to anyone, so others are not able to self-enroll to this course.
- If you prefer to allow fellow faculty to self-signup to your course, you'll still want to add an access code to your class (which you can do via the 'Manage Class' page). This way, faculty will not need to provide a school specific email address when signing up, they will only need to enter the class access code. Note, if your school does not have an email domain associated with it, an access code is automatically generated for your class.
Share your class signup link and the access code (both of which you can retrieve from your 'Manage Class' page) with attendees so they're able to sign up for the class.
Faculty are prompted to enter the access code when enrolling.
- To help your colleagues become familiar with Piazza, it’s a good idea to post a welcome post, orienting them to the platform's key features. You can also add a couple polls as a way to begin conversations related to the conference.
If you have questions about setting up a Piazza class for your specific use case, email us at team@piazza.com and we'll help get you started!