Piazza is the School’s recommended platform for course discussions. It is integrated with Learn.
Important: from the summer 2023, the task of setting up course Piazza pages through Learn will be taken over by the ILTS, rather than being the responsibility of course teaching teams. If you are a member of teaching staff, please contact the ILTS team to ask us to do this for your course, if it has not been done already.
All course Piazza classes should be set up using the LTI integration in Learn to Piazza. This ensures that the Piazza class will be set up officially within the University of Edinburgh license. Additionally anyone enrolled on your Learn course (Students and Instructors) will have an easier approach to enrolling into your Piazza class.
Please note that, by default, accessing Piazza from Learn will add all users with their email address in the UUN@ed.ac.uk format. If you already have a Piazza account with a different email address or alias, please see the instructions from Piazza about how to add an email address or merge two accounts. (Please note that if you choose to merge your accounts, all data associated with the secondary account(s) will be lost.)
The Piazza link in Learn
The Piazza LTI link has been added to all Informatics courses via the School of Informatics template and looks like this in the list of contents on the course. (As of July 2023, it appears with a rocketship icon on Learn, but IS are trying to change this to Piazza’s “P” logo.)
(If, for some reason, the Piazza LTI link is not on the course Learn page, you can add it using the instructions here. Make sure to select the option from the Content Market called “Piazza QA” (and not the one just called “Piazza”) to make sure you are using the most up-to-date version for 2023-24.)
Create the Piazza Class
The first time an Instructor on the Learn course clicks on the Piazza LTI link, they will be faced with a form (as shown below) for creating a new class or linking to an existing class.
Please create a new class for the new academic year to ensure that the correct license is applied.
When creating a new class the Course Name and a suggested ID will be auto-populated from the information in Learn, all you have to do is add the estimated roster size for the class in terms of numbers of students.
Once created, complete the additional fields that are suggested by Piazza, or alternatively skip this step using the link at the bottom of the form page. You can let the Course Organiser know that they can adjust these settings to suit their needs by accessing the Piazza Class via Learn and then selecting the “Manage Course” tab at the top of the page. They can also import settings from a previous Piazza class, if they want.
Your Piazza Class is now ready for use. The Piazza tool is available to students by default in the School of Informatics Learn template, but just make sure that no one has hidden it from their view.
Important: If you want copy last year’s Piazza class to use again this year, please do that (instructions from Piazza on how to clone an existing class) and then follow the instructions posted here to create a Piazza class linked to Learn through the LTI. When you get to the box shown below “Already have a class on Piazza?”, find your new copy of last year’s Piazza class and link it here. This ensures that the copy you made is connected to this year’s course Learn page and all students and staff will be able to access it via the Piazza link in Learn. If you just make a copy of last year’s course and do not link it to Learn, students often get confused about how to find it or get told that they do not have permission to access it. This also ensures that you are using the current license for Piazza.
