About
- Edstem.org is a discussion board platform some Schools in the College of Science and Engineering are piloting – including Informatics.
- Edstem is being seen as a potential replacement for Piazza with a much more up-to-date interface – and is feature-comparable with Piazza.
- EdStem has been Learn-LTI enabled for the School – there is an EdStem MS Team space set up for interested parties – contact the ILTS team for info.
- The following Informatics courses are participating in the EdStem pilot for 2024/25:
- Advanced Robotics
- Algorithmic Game Theory and its Applications
- Computing in the Classroom
- Natural Language Understanding, Generation, and Machine Translation
- Programming for Biomedical Informatics.
- Please note that our EdStem instance is in the EU zone (DP / InfoSec reasons) – so course URLs will be https://edstem.org/eu/… – you may at times see a drop-down for region – select ‘Europe’.
Setting Up
This is only for those courses above. No other courses in Informatics should be using this for 24/25 – continue to use Piazza.
Step 1
Go to + Content Market and hit + EdStem Discussion to add a permanent link to your course. Link is hidden from students by default.
Step 2
Click on the + link. This will open up a modal above the content (not in a new tab) and after a sec will CREATE the EdStem discussion for this course – using Course Name and Id
- This will do an initial sync of Learn users to the EdStem roster
- Email addresses are of the form of <uun>@ed.ac.uk for both staff and students.
- Staff or students will not have a password to begin with – you can add this via your profile icon (top right). Also add 2FA
- At start of Semester 1 there is no SSO with EASE – students should be encouraged to come in via Learn – but also see Setting up a Password (optional) below.
Step3
- Continue Setup then SKIP the Announcement. We recommend skipping the Announcement – as that will post an email to all participants (there’s no way to post without emailing – you do get a warning Post/cancel about this).
- You probably don’t want to email students at the point of creation – you can add a Welcome announcement later.
Step 4: Using EdStem
- You now have an empty course – you will need to make it visible to students in Learn when ready.
- It is recommend you read https://edstem.org/help/ now – it is important that you and your TAs seed discussion. We recommend doing a show-and-tell with your TAs. You can be added to some test courses to try things out – contact the ILTS team if this is of interest.
- If you want to add a welcome – you can add the Welcome Announcement you skipped over
- The welcome recommends the Quick Start Guide which is good
- Also point your students to the Students tab of https://edstem.org/help/ – which has Using Ed Discussion, Latex – and push notifications.
Setting up a password (optional)
There are advantages in setting up a password – it allows you to login by clicking on edstem links in emails, for example. Choose a good, secure password.
