The online Q&A platform Piazza is moving to a dual advertisement-supported / paid model in the new year. The university recognises that Piazza is a highly valued teaching tool and we are actively exploring licensing options for Piazza and equivalent platforms.
At this stage we will not have a licensing agreement in place with Piazza before January 2021, when Piazza will introduce Google Ads to the free version of their tool. You can read about Piazza’s new model, including its implications for student privacy and data, here:
If you do not wish to use the ad-supported free version of Piazza, Discussions within Canvas provide basic discussion functions:
Canvas Discussions does not, however, include some Piazza features such as student anonymity, instructor-endorsed answers, and collaborative post editing.
UPDATE 18/01/21: Piazza shared an update on 23/12/2020 that instead of an unpaid ad-supported model, they “are now offering a contribution-supported unpaid version of Piazza (much like how Wikipedia asks for donations). This shift to a contribution-supported model addresses the privacy concerns that we heard from faculty around the ad-supported model.”