With over 700 million downloads, Apple’s iTunes U has been a massive success, but unlike other new online learning services like Udacity or Codecademy, it’s missing a social component where students can ask questions and learn from each other. Apple, Stanford University and the Palo Alto-based startup Piazza have now teamed up to bring Piazza’s social learning platform for students, TAs and professors to the next session of Stanford’s highly popular iOS development class on iTunes U. This is a first for iTunes U and Piazza and Stanford worked closely with Apple to get a link to the course’s Piazza site embedded in iTunes U.

As Piazza’s founder and CEO Pooja Sankar told me last week, there has clearly been a trend towards making more and more educational content available online. There is also plenty of software out there that helps teachers create content and manage their students. What’s been lacking, though, in her view, is a tool that creates engagement around this content. “Learning,” she said, “is severely hampered by this.”

With Piazza, though, students can ask each other questions (both under their real name and anonymously) and discuss what’s happening in a class in real time and use a wiki-like site to edit responses. It’s important to stress that Piazza is more than just a message board. The service, for example, distinguishes between responses from students, which they can edit together, and responses from teachers, which they can also collaborate on. Students can also see how many of their classmates are online at the same time.

So far, Piazza has raised about $6 million in funding and the company currently has 11 employees. Sankar started working on the product in 2010 and launched her first small beta tests at Stanford in January 2011. At that time, about 4,000 students used the system. Today, she told me, the service is being used by closer to 250,000 students at universities around the world.

Stanford’s iOS class saw over 10 million downloads for individual lecture videos so far, making it one of the most popular online courses around. The collaboration with Piazza, sais Brent Izutsu, the program manager for iTunes U at Stanford, will hopefully enhance learning and unleash some of the “enormous potential for collaboration and community-building though Q&A and problem-solving with friends from across the globe.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Piazza, a Q&A platform for students and instructors, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners with Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures also participating in the round. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital and SV Angel.

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.

Piazza, which emerged from private beta in January, now enrolls more than 100,000 students hundreds of schools worldwide. This includes 109 of the top 250 colleges in the United States. Campuses where students are using Piazza include Stanford, Virginia Tech, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Michigan/

Piazza also shared usage data today from fall term courses, with 96% of all questions received an answer within a median response time of only 25 minutes. In terms of the breakdown, 45% of questions received an answer from a student and 67% of questions were addressed by instructors (some were answered by both).

The most active class on Piazza was a computer science class at Berkeley, where students recorded over 19,000 contributions during the course of the semester, or an average of one contribution every 22 minutes. One student in this class answered 463 of his peers’ questions. 74% of the students contributed some sort of feedback.

Students who sign on to Piazza stay logged in for an average of four hours a day, typically keeping the application open as a third tab in their browser. Piazza also recently introduced mobile clients for iOS and Android.

Piazza plans to use the new funding for research and development as well as towards expansion efforts in other schools and universities.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Piazza, a Q&A platform for students and instructors, is debuting iOS and Android mobile apps, allowing students to share ideas and get answers on the go.

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.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch