How Is Piazza Being Used in Clinical Debrief?

Piazza online Q&A

What is Piazza?

Piazza (www.piazza.com) is an online forum especially designed for education. Piazza allows you to set up Programmes or Courses with classrooms of Students and Tutors. These Classrooms are mini-communities in which anyone can ask a question, and anyone else within the community can respond. Tutors are identified as Instructors and can reply with an ‘instructors’ response’ or approve other students’ responses. In this way, the classroom becomes a Community of Practice, with everyone contributing, but with ‘knowledgeable members’ or experts within the community.

How is Piazza being used in Clinical Debrief?

For the purposes of CD, a classroom has been established that contains all CD tutors and on call tutors (CBME Academics) and the CD Working Group members. The CD tutors and CBME Academics will be designated as ‘students’ and the CD Working Group members are designated as ‘instructors’. They are there to provide guidance and advice and will do so through the Piazza forum. Any tutor may post a question on Piazza and anyone may respond with an answer, or possibly a supplementary question. You can also Edit questions and responses, wiki-style. The instructor can provide an informed response or endorse a response given by another student. This builds up a bank of knowledge that the rest of the community (and future communities) can draw on.

How do I get onto the Piazza forum?

At the start of the Academic year all tutors will be enrolled on the Clinical Debrief Tutor Forum “course” in Piazza. They will be sent a password and will be able to use this to log onto the classroom. Once on they will be able to see a Course summary, resources and the question forum.

Will people outside Clinical Debrioef be able to see these questions?

No. Only CD tutors, CBME academics and CD working group members will be enrolled on the course will be able see and post questions.

How do I post a question?

It’s really easy - just click on the ‘New Post’ button in the top left hand menu and then type the question

How do I post a response?

Click on theStart off a Students' Responseto start the Students' Response. Or, clickEdit Answerto edit it, just like Wikipedia.

Can students ask questions anonymously?

Yes. Studies have shown that students are often reluctant to ask questions for fear of looking ignorant, so Piazza allows them to ask questions anonymously. To do this, when asking a question, look for the dropdown menu next toAsk This!. You have two options to post anonymously:
Anonymous to classmates: Only instructors will see your name; classmates won't.
Anonymous to everyone: No one will see your name. Instructors can disable this option from the class settings page.
Instructors do not have the option to post anonymously.

Of course, this feature is open to abuse and the system administrator has the ability to delete inappropriate questions or remove the anonymous feature if required. Other users can also mark a question as inappropriate to bring it to the attention of the administrator.

What else can you do in Piazza?

Piazza has the option to do many other things – Instructors can add resources, set homework, set up study groups or make announcements; students have the ability to follow specific questions or threads, send private posts or questions to an instructor or tag and search for questions.