Piazza (Forum/Discussion tool)

Piazza is a very robust and highly-intuitive question and answer tool with more features than the built in discussion forums that are often used for similar cases. Learn more about Piazza on their web site.

Lehigh University is already a managed institution with Piazza. The following instructions will show you how to add a Piazza Q&A activity to your Course Site course.

How to add a Piazza activity to your Course Site course

Open

With editing turned on, locate the topic section you want to add the activity to and click Add an activity or resource. This will bring up the Add an activity or resource window (shown above). Click External tool then click Add.

Open

Under General, type a name for the activity in the Activity name field. From the External tool type drop-down menu, select Piazza.

There are additional fields and options you can specify including an activity description to provide extra detail to your students about the activity. You can see these additional fields by clicking the Show more... link.

NOTE: Under Privacy settings, there are three options. The first two are set at the system level and cannot be changed. The third setting, however, Accept grades from the tool, is a setting that is left up to the instructor of the course. Piazza's default is to have this checked. If this option is checked, it will add the activity to the grade book and additional grade options will appear. If you do NOT want this activity to appear as a grade item in your grade book, make sure this option is not checked.

Once you are finished, click either Save and return to course or Save and display.

Click on the new Piazza Link to setup. 

Initial setup of Piazza course

(Your first time using Piazza, you will be prompted one time only to create a password and confirm that you have read the license agreement.)

If this is the first Piazza activity you are adding to your course, you will be prompted with a screen like the one shown above where you will be able to create your class in Piazza so you can add more Piazza activities as the course progresses. Simply confirm the information displayed including your Lehigh email (only Lehigh email addresses are permitted). Click Continue.

On the next page, you be be informed that a verification code has been sent to your email address. Check your email and enter the Verification Code then click Confirm.

NOTE: If you do not receive a verification email within 5-10 minutes, click the Resend Code button to have a new email sent.

Once you have verified the code, simply confirm the information about the course, enter the Estimated Enrollment and click Create New Piazza Class.

If you suspect your class may already exist in Piazza, scroll down further and click Search for this class. During first-time setup, clicking that button should simply reveal a message that the course could not be found. If it has been found, you can either use that existing course or contact the Instructional Technology team by submitting a ticket at https://help.lehigh.edu.

Final configuration steps

There are some final configuration steps that you need to complete on the Piazza end. For more information on those, please see Piazza's tutorial.

One general note - for consistency and ease-of-use for students, we strongly recommend making this connection through Course Site, the university's LMS (learning management system) as it is the one place students are used to going for all course related instruction and material. Once the connection is made the students will always be able to access the Piazza activities from the same Course Site link you have just created.

Questions?

Feel free to contact your instructional technologist with any questions or problems at www.lehigh.edu/help.