Departments might set up a Piazza for students belonging to various organizations. Examples we’ve seen would be a Piazza class for the Women in Computer Science program at a particular university.
Setting up Piazza this way enables knowledge to stay within the community as students graduate, while making it easier to ask questions and search for answers over a traditional mailing list or chat channel. Faculty and student club leaders typically enroll as the “instructors” to the class, while student members enroll as the “students” to the class.
The ability for student groups to communicate via a Piazza class provides students affiliated with these student organizations a safe space to ask for help and provide other students in their community with the support they seek.
Tips to get started:
- Create a Piazza course within your university. An example of a course name might be "Women in CS".
- If you'd like for the class to live on for several terms, use term 'Other' when selecting academic term.
- From your 'Manage Class' page, enroll faculty and student club leaders 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 students manually via 'Manage Class' page. Scroll to the 'Manage Enrollment' section of this page to add student emails or upload a student 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 students to self-signup to your course, they can do so with a valid school email address. Share the class signup link, which you can retrieve from your 'Manage Class' page, with students.
For an additional layer of control, you can set an access code from your ‘Manage Class’ page, and provide this access code to students in the organization. Students will be prompted to enter this access code when signing up for the course.
If you have questions about setting up a Piazza class for your specific use case, email us at [email protected] and we'll help get you started!