Piazza Lecture Series Podcast Piazza

Mr. Samuel Nyiendo, Lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya and Riara University

Mr. Samuel Nyiendo has over 30 years experience in computer-based training and courseware development. When he is not teaching, he is pursuing a PhD in Business Information Systems at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology. Nyiendo currently holds a Masters in Information Systems Technologies from the United States International University of Africa, Nairobi, Kenya.

In this Lecture, hosted from Nairobi, Nyiendo discusses how Piazza has helped remedy some of the challenges facing instructors and students in Kenya where obstacles caused by economic, social, political and technological barriers have created a vast Digital Divide in education between the developing world and industrialized nations.

Looking for ways to improve student engagement, Nyiendo first discovered Piazza while watching another lecturer on YouTube. Created with accessibility as a priority, Piazza is a free platform for instructors and students and is available to use on any device. In cases where there may be a shortage of technological or financial resources, including computers, internet bandwidth, or budget cuts, Piazza can be used on mobile devices, allowing students to connect with their instructors and classmates without any major barriers.

Piazza’s accessibility allows Nyiendo to interact with his students outside class time, allowing students to engage with their coursework anywhere and anytime. With Piazza, Nyiendo is able to track a student’s ‘digital footprint’ and can therefore better address individual progress and needs. This is especially important in class environments where a gap in computer skills exists between groups of students. Since adopting Piazza, Nyiendo has received significant positive feedback from students and maintains high student enrollment and retention in his courses.

Nyiendo hopes his learnings on using Piazza to bridge the digital divide in Kenya can be applied across the African continent, and to other areas that struggle to make education accessible for all. Even in the developed world, many of the same challenges he faces are present: budget cuts to education initiatives, distance learners, and students who are disengaged in their classes because of social or economic reasons.

Nyiendo concludes his lecture with the idea to use Piazza as a forum to create a global community of teachers and learners to share best practices and methodologies for making education accessible for all.

Want to learn more? Email us anytime at team@piazza.com with questions.
If you'd like to participate in a future topic, please email us at lectureseries@piazza.com.
Check out other key topics in Pedagogy at piazzalectureseries.com.

Professor Denyer has been teaching Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Nutrition at the University of Sydney since 1990. Over the years, he has pioneered the introduction of several eLearning innovations and, recently, these have strongly embraced the principles of crowd-leverage and student-teacher partnerships in the learning process. Particularly valued are sustainable initiatives that not only foster student communication and engagement, but which capture that activity as a lasting legacy so that value can be added to subsequent iterations of a course.

Gareth started using Piazza in 2014, primarily as a way of achieving efficiency in course coordination by reducing the need to respond to repetitive administrative and content-based requests. However, it soon became clear that the daily flow of queries built to an invaluable resource regarding student issues and how his teaching was resonating with those on the receiving end. This crowd-sourcing of intelligence allowed Gareth to not only respond ‘just in time’ to the student voice, it allowed him to informed by it. This, in turn, has allowed development of teaching and assessment resources directly inspired by genuine student misconceptions and authentically aligned to their foundational capabilities and beliefs.

​When used effectively, Piazza provides the central focus for communication between an instructor and their student. Accordingly, Gareth has developed several strategies for maintaining the enjoyment, health, momentum and usefulness of this dynamic and collaborative space. Since engagement with online collaborative tools are well-established barometers for student success, Gareth and colleagues regularly inspect the in-built Piazza metrics so that they can encourage students at all levels to contribute to and derive value from, both posting and answering questions in this safe environment. Gareth is also passionate about systems which allow recognition of the hard work and input of dedicated instructors, something that Piazza accomplishes with great objectivity.

In this Lecture, Professor Denyer will share some of the many tips and tricks that he uses within Piazza to stimulate student participation, build community and, ultimately, leverage the crowd to add intel-based enhancements to course delivery and assessment.

Want to learn more? Email us anytime at team@piazza.com with questions.

​If you'd like to participate in a future topic, please email us at lectureseries@piazza.com.

“You're developing a common language for how to write a solution to certain problems, and it's visible for everyone in the course to see. It spreads among the instructors and the students because there's this central place to see it.”
- Professor Daniel Erman on using Piazza in his large math courses.

Daniel Erman, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hosts this session of the Piazza Lecture Series. Professor Erman discusses how he manages and trains a team of TAs to effectively and efficiently manage large calculus courses on Piazza.

Erman regularly teaches calculus courses with other lecturers in the math department for over a thousand students. He’s found that there are several challenges that lecturers face when managing large classes, such as making the most efficient use of instructors’ time, creating a uniform experience for students across lectures, and being mindful of TAs needs for conducting research while also encouraging them to become independent teachers. As class sizes increase, Erman says “our goal is to give all of our undergrads a really high experience in the course, but we want to find a way to do this without overtaxing the TAs.”

Erman found that Piazza helped his TAs spend less time on replying to repeat questions over email and allows them to optimize their time spent on course management. In Professor Erman’s words, taking steps to demonstrate that he cared about his TAs time “developed a better working relationship, [which] has residual effects beyond just the individual course.” He also noticed Piazza allowed his teaching team to develop uniform responses to questions because their posts were visible to all, ensuring that students and instructors remained on the same page throughout the term about course logistics and grading.

We invite you to listen in on this session to learn how Professor Erman optimizes teaching quality, ensures equal student experiences in large classes, and offers his tips for best managing calculus courses on Piazza by creating better working environments for TAs.

Want to learn more? Email us anytime at team@piazza.com with questions.

If you'd like to participate in a future topic, please email us at lectureseries@piazza.com.

“We can see that almost twice as many papers are published since we started the collaboration on Piazza.”

-Professor Birgitta Lindström, University of Skövde

Jeff Offutt, Professor of Software Engineering at George Mason University and Birgitta Lindström, Professor of Informatics at the University of Skövde, Sweden co-host this session of the Piazza Lecture Series. Professor Offutt and Professor Lindström discuss how they co-teach an asynchronous, discussion-based upper level computer science course on Piazza.

Offutt and Lindström moved their small, discussion-based course onto Piazza and found that the discussion that arose on Piazza was deeper, covered more thoughtful issues, and offered both students and instructors additional chances to learn than in the traditional classroom setting. They found that students created better conversations and generated more interesting content when they had the opportunity for reflective participation, and additional time to better formulate and prepare thoughts than in an impromptu discussion in class. All students were also able to contribute because they weren’t bound by class time, and no one could dominate the discussion.

Offutt and Lindström received an increase in positive evaluations from their students after moving the discussions onto Piazza, and found their own experience more rewarding because the discussions were more interesting and allowed them to continue to learn from their students. Professor Offut describes Piazza as a student-driven environment: “I want them [students] to feel like they have a party and every now and then the professor drops in. I don’t want them to feel like they’re invited to the professor’s house for a party, because nobody is comfortable when that happens.”

We invite you to listen in on this session to learn how Professor Offutt and Professor Lindström virtually merge geographically-dispersed students in a unique collaboration, and their tips for creating deeper, more meaningful discussions on Piazza.

Want to learn more? Email us anytime at team@piazza.com with questions.
If you'd like to participate in a future topic, please email us at lectureseries@piazza.com.

In this session of the Piazza Lecture Series, Dr. Rania Al-Hammoud of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo hosts a session on engaging women in STEM courses on Piazza. Dr. Al-Hammoud has researched effective ways to better understand and promote active learning in engineering education, and discovered Piazza as an effective way to create a learning environment for all her students--especially the women--in her classroom. She is joined by several other leading experts on the topic who describe their own experiences with engaging women in their courses on Piazza.

Dr. Al-Hammoud discusses how anonymous posting on Piazza enables her female students to participate more freely in the classroom, to develop confidence in their understanding of the course material, and to empower their peers by answering their questions. We learn that anonymous posting not only empowers women to participate more often, but also eliminates inherent biases that male counterparts may have when reading a question or answer posted by a female peer.

Later in the session, Professor Swapneel Sheth of the University of Pennsylvania reiterated this point powerfully, by noting that when students were asked if they would still want to use Piazza if there were no anonymous posting feature available, 50 percent of male students said they would prefer not use it, while almost 90 percent of female students said they would prefer not to use Piazza if they were unable to post anonymously.

We invite you to listen in on this session to learn how Dr. Al-Hammoud and other teaching experts use Piazza to actively engage women in their STEM courses.

Want to learn more? Email us anytime at team@piazza.com with questions.
If you'd like to participate in a future topic, please email us at lectureseries@piazza.com.