Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

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This is great news. However, anyone who's used Piazza (the main "classroom" tool for OMSCS) knows that it's hardly ideal. I think a better collaboration/discussion tool is imperative to making the experience better for the "average" student.

Sure the top students in the program are going to do well, by definition, but there are plenty of more "middling" people like myself that can only be brought up to the next level with proper discussion/interaction with classmates. From my experience even PHPbb would be a more effective tool than Piazza.

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Suggestions (if Piazza folks are reading):

1. Allow one to delete follow-ups.

2. Allow students to create private "study group"-like threads that aren't in the main feed.

3. Make it easier to upload pictures and other content.

4. Make things live. Normally this wouldn't be necessary, but anyone in the program knows many students post the same thing at the same time as a response to an event (like an email). By doing this you prevent redundant threads from being created.

5. Use some sort of up/down voting system that way the community can self-regulate.

There are plenty more things I'd improve, but for the sake of brevity those are some I just came up with on the spot.

edX (the partner through which Georgia Tech will be offering this program) uses its own homebuilt forums/discussions software, which offers many of the features you list. It's also open source, so if you or others have more discussion features in mind and have Python, Ruby or Backbone experience, PRs are welcome!

Disclaimer: software engineer at edX, have worked on discussions features in the past. Happy to answer questions.

I have taken over 30 courses on edX in the past few years (many more on Coursera). Some of those courses used Piazza, most the edX forums, so I know both systems. I also was a Community TA so I know the (few) options a CTA gets on edX.

Overall, IMHO Piazza clearly has far more features.

That said, I still prefer edX forums simply because I hardly ever need any of the Piazza features - and the Piazza GUI IMHO is much worse than edX especially for the target group. After edX implemented the sort-option "by activity" and "show only unread" my major complaints were solved.

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By the way, since I hope you read this reply, the worst by far on edX is that the darn page just won't stand still!

Please stop the "convenience scrolling (by Javascript)". Also, the height of the page changes when I select a comment that does/doesn't fit in the viewport (long threads vs. no-responses-yet comments, for example, and that too triggers automatic scrolling.

Next, the size of the text box changes! I use Chrome to make it much larger to see my entire long and carefully crafted and formatted comment, then I switch to another tab to do more research for my reply, but when I click back into the textbox it shrinks back to its small default size. Could you please leave my manually-made-large textbox as it is?

No changes of scroll positions, no changes of sizes, no changes of anything, please. Not just in the forum, the course pages have the same annoying (anti-)"feature". I find it very inconvenient when the GUI changes under me, it's the GUI equivalent of walking on ice.

I would also enjoy a feature to "mark all as read", so that I can use "show only unread" at any point in time. Right now that feature forces me to have clicked on each and every comment before it is useful.

Life update would be "nice to have" too, especially for a TA (if it's too expensive for server-load, how about offering it just for the TA and STAFF user groups).

What is also missing is even the slightest hint (in the comment editor, or anywhere) that you support LaTeX style formulas! As well as some help for beginners how to use it.

I know Christmas was last month, but that's my wishlist :-)

What I don't miss are votes. That always gets misused, and it is of very limited benefit. I see the value of votes in forums on something like reddit, I don't see benefit in edX forums with a focus on Q&A. Especially not down-votes. Even the "pin to top" doesn't really work: At least 70% of users don't ever notice pinned posts. If there have to be votes, do it like Disqus: You can see who voted. Or instead of votes do what Github did in the issues comments.

By the way, why do you still have votes at all? They are only displayed if anyone specifically checks them in a given comment. They used to be shown in the comment overview on the left. Right now the "vote" feature can be removed and nobody would notice.

Some random ideas:

Feature: Allow Staff and TAs to post without their status. Just like on reddit. Not everything I had to say was "official", and one reason I turned down several invitations to be a CTA on edX was because I really hated to have a green banner around every single one of my posts. Too much pressure, and just because I'm TA doesn't make all my answers "precious".

Feature: Allow admins (TAs, Staff) to merge threads. For example, the introductions at the beginning where 500 people post their own "glad to be here" thread instead of using the pinned(!) "Post your introduction here" thread, or when there is an issue and 50 people each report it (even when the last 20 new threads are about that same subject, most people post immediately before looking at the forum).

Feature: Detect if you responded to this person in the past. It's nice and gives a feeling of familiarity to find out you talked to someone in the past.

Feature: Geolocation. Show where the other people (in the current thread) are located.

Feature: Combine Wiki and forum: From within the forum let people select comments and/or threads for the Wiki. Ask the for some additional information, like choosing a Wiki page/section. This can address the problem that good comments are quickly buried by all the new ones.

Bug report: It seems right now the "Section" or "Chapter" or whatever you call it is not displayed in comments.

Thanks for the feedback - we hear you and I myself have encountered a lot of the issues you mention. I've passed this along to our product team and I'll see if I can turn some of the easier stuff into tickets myself that we can groom next time we jump back into this code.

For almost every course I've taken in OMSCS, I always run into those issues. I'm pretty sure Piazza team knows about these problems too, because I had these issues since I was taking courses in undergrad (4-5 years ago). What this makes me think is that Piazza is just incapable of improving its own core product because it's struggling to monetize and generate revenue. I think Piazza in its current state just doesn't work at the scale of OMSCS. It could work with class size of maybe 30-40 students. I would gladly switch over to another product if it was offered as an option.

As a current OMSCS student I have to agree that Piazza is less than optimal. I've found that in order to be successful I have to put in significant effort to communicate across all channels - Piazza, Slack, Hangouts, HipChat, email, Skype. The classes do vary in difficulty and polish. I definitely have had some negative experiences with students that weren't prepared or weren't doing the necessary reading and studying.

We're using Slack the product design course I'm teaching at University of Michigan this semester[1]. Not only does it do that stuff better than Piazza, but it'll get students used to the tools startups use for communication (though I have my issues with Slack).

[1] http://umichdesign.com/

Your second point rubs me the wrong way, a little bit. You probably didn't mean it like this, but... I think educators should have the education in mind first, and employability second. In this case, nobody is going to put Slack on their resume, so... I just find the argument strange

I could definitely see why you read it that way! I just meant that Slack has some drawbacks, like any tool. Specifically at work, when large groups are collaborating on important projects, I've been relying on wikis, email, and issue trackers more.

If the same issues creep into the class, we'll reconsider Slack. What probably won't change is the popularity of online collaboration tools for all workers. Fostering a community of similar learners to ask questions, share work, and help each other is one of our goals for the semester.

As I heard it put when I went through GT, "We're training you for the last job you'll ever have."

The more I'm out in the working world and interacting with people from a diversity of educational backgrounds, the more I agree with that approach.

(I'm specifically thinking about the "No, we as a profession tried that in the 70s, and here's why we decided it was a bad idea" moments)

Nobody puts bash on their resume either but in my observation interns that come in with extensive command line/tooling experience from school (myself included) are much more likely to be seen favorably and converted to full time because they can spend less time fighting with their computer and more time delivering.

Bash is maybe not the best example because it's indeed a skill listed for many devops positions.

When I first started doing Udacity they used Piazza which was okay. I believe OMSCS is going through Udacity also. We eventually switched over to Discourse I believe and it addresses most of your concerns. The search and duplicate checking before posting is great.

Many of the students and TAs are also on the slack group, omscs-study. It's far from ideal because it's "non-official" but it addresses a lot of these complaints.

Piazza has been a pretty good tool IMO. I haven't used it in the context of the OMSCS, only in all my undergrad classes at Berkeley, but it's been a really helpful tool when there's good moderation from the Professors and TAs.

Maybe this condition does not hold true for the OMSCS, but I think almost all your problems can be solved by a good moderation team.

I agree with you about Piazza. I was always very active during the OMSCS program on Piazza, but it didn't seem ideal for those "middling" folks. The biggest problem was important discussions and ideas getting buried. There just wasn't a good way to keep track of it all.

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