Piazza

Piazza is used quite a bit at my college. Teachers looking for some way to set up a forum for all things related to their classroom can get lots of use out of it. I'll speak about the student-side experience.

Piazza lets you post a question about anything pertaining to the class, where it will be shown in a sidebar on the left. Other classmates, professors, and TAs can look at and respond to the question. Piazza has a sort of "wiki" style, in which, I quote, "...students collectively construct a single answer". This means that if one of your classmates writes an answer and you think you can improve it, then you can edit the answer to add your own ideas. Instructors have a similar section to do the same thing. After each post there is also a "followup discussion" section if one still needs more clarification on the question.

It's pretty simple, but it work very nicely.

There's a few other parts of Piazza, like finding job opportunities from companies scouring your Piazza profile, but I never bothered to use it, so I can't say how well it works.

A little quirk with the email login: if your college supports having a G Suite, there was some point at which Piazza "doubled up" on valid emails for me to log in with. I wasn't aware of it, so I got extremely annoyed at getting Piazza emails every four hours when I kept pressing "once a day". I didn't realize that I was changing the settings for only one email, and the other one was still set to every four hours.

Side note: files uploaded under the "resources" tab are hosted by Amazon AWS.