#WEBSITES LIKE COURSEFORUM SOFTWARE#

#WEBSITES LIKE COURSEFORUM SOFTWARE#

Sites like Quora, Stackoverflow, Reddit, and others and software like Discourse also aim to help create communities centered around problem solving and information sharing.Īnd to a great degree what distinguishes these tools from each other are design choices, particularly regarding their user interface. Piazza isn’t the only tool with similar aims, even if it is dominant in the educational space.

Because it’s not.īut on Piazza’s homepage the word forum does not appear.Īnd if you read the rest of the description, particularly the focus on saving time and immediate action, the true design goals become more clear. The name Piazza itself lends itself to that misunderstanding of Piazza as forum software: An online venue where discussions about course content take place. I ’ve observed that colleagues tend to describe Piazza as their “course forum”. In doing so, it ends up discouraging the dialogue that supports student learning and understanding, and so ends up inhibiting, rather than supporting, student learning. Piazza claims to want to help students learn.īut, on inspection, it’s fairly clear that it’s primary goal is actually to help students extract answers from course staff as efficiently as possible. Piazza has a lot of technical problems, which I’ll a bit of fun with in just a few minutes.īut my biggest problem with it is pedagogical, not technological. If you teach students and want them to learn, I don’t think you should either. I haven’t used Piazza for my courses for many years. It’s become ubiquitous, at least at US universities. I f you’ve attended university in the past decade, you’ve probably used Piazza.

Websites like courseforum