Class engagement ++
Pooja Sankar was one of three women in her computer science class in college in India. Recently, the former Facebook, Kosmix, and Oracle engineer launched Piazza, a free online app that allows students and instructors to discuss class material in real time, something she would have found valuable as a student.
Piazza is catching on at a number of top universities, including Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. The online app had 70K new enrollments this Fall term alone; the average student user stays on Piazza for about 4 hours per night. Instructors can chime in to answer questions, or mark students’ responses as “good answers.”
