Piazza’s platform helps classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they’re also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there’s a version history that shows what each student wrote.
Both students and professors can create Piazza hubs for their classes. Instructor answers are separated from the students’ to make them easier to find. And professors can also look to see which questions have been bookmarked by the most students to gauge which topics they should explain better in class.
Students at a number of educational institutions have started using Piazza, including students at Stanford, Georgia Tech, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, Purdue, Virginia Tech, the University of Waterloo, the University of British Columbia, Princeton, the University of Texas, and the University of Central Florida.
Piazza’s mobile apps include much of the same functionality as the web app, allowing users to read, post, search, and edit questions. The apps also offer a question feed that lets students and instructors go directly to open questions or answers they haven’t read yet.
The company also released new metrics regarding engagement on the site. Users currently make more than 40,000 answers and edits each week while viewing more than one million questions.
Piazza is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kapor Capital, Felicis Ventures and SV Angel.