Academic Collaboration Platform Piazza Reports 10x Increase in Instructor Adoption

Piazza, a provider of online academic collaboration platform for students and instructors, announced it has experienced explosive growth for its Q&A platform with over 10x increase in faculty adoption since the end of January.

Since its public availability nine months ago, Piazza now has over 2,500 instructors using its platform across hundreds of schools, according to company officials.

The number of classes created in the month of July alone exceeded the total number created in the 2011 Spring quarter. The number of schools using Piazza’s free online collaboration platform increased 100 percent last month over the combined first six months of the year.

Piazza is a free online collaboration platform that allows students and instructors to help each other quickly find high-quality answers to difficult questions. Users need not download or install any software. It is found that Piazza members spend two-to-four hours each night collaborating with their classmates.

“When we developed Piazza, we envisioned a platform that could transform and enrich students’ academic experiences and achievements, and we are thrilled that students, professors, and TAs have adopted it so readily” said Pooja (Nath) Sankar, Piazza’s founder and CEO, in a statement.

Piazza also announced the launch of Piazza Student Quads. These school-specific home pages enable students to browse classes already using Piazza and band together to request that new instructors start using it for their respective classes. After getting requests from sufficient number of students, the system automatically sends e-mail to their instructor explaining the students’ interest in the platform.

Student Quads are built to channel the enthusiasm of the students to the campus at large and make it beneficial to the entire student community, company officials said.

“Using Piazza for my Intro to Computer class was a life saver because I was able to communicate real time with my classmates to collectively solve massively complicated problems,” said Jon Lexa, a senior at UCLA and president of the school’s Cognitive Science Society, in a statement.

Piazza platform is not confined to traditional universities. Piazza announced that the CK-12 Foundation, which seeks to make high-quality content available for free to students, teachers, and schools, is using Piazza to connect instructors for curriculum refinement.

Another organization, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will be piloting Piazza this fall at 27 community colleges to improve the teaching of mathematics and to connect instructors who are working with the foundation on the development of a math curriculum, the company said.

Recently Piazza announced it received $1.5M in seed funding from Sequoia Capital (News - Alert), Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital and SV Angel.

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