Pooja Sankar: Building the Piazza Collaboration System

Pooja Sankar describes an online collaboration tool that's growing in popularity among engineering and computer science students. The Piazza online collaboration tool is quickly becoming a popular way to enhance student interaction and involvement in engineering and computer science courses. Piazza combines features from blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions, resulting in a system that encourages students to answer each other's questions and collectively build knowledge around course materials throughout the duration of the course. Essentially, the tool recreates the kind of interactions that small face-to-face study groups typically experience when they're covering challenging material in a course.