ONLINE DISCUSSION & COLLABORATION TOOLS

Harmonize vs. Piazza

Both Harmonize and Piazza focus on increasing student participation.

But what makes Harmonize a better solution?

A bigger, better toolset focused on discussion, collaboration and student engagement.

vs. Piazza's single Q&A tool
Discussion Forums
ChatGPT + Plagiarism Detection
Q&A
Chat
Polling
PDF Annotation
Video Annotation
Grid view

A bigger toolset yields better results & easier content discovery.

Harmonize integrates more cleanly into your LMS with less setup and has a familiar user interface, making it easier to learn.

Harmonize’s full suite of online discussion & collaboration tools provides students and instructors with everything they need to have vibrant course discussions, including: image, video & PDF  annotationchatpolls, and Q&A. Content is structured naturally.

Thought subjective, the Harmonize interface is cleaner and more modern for editing content than Piazza. It also has a seamless integration with the LMS. Piazza requires students to take specific, time-consuming steps to enter information and create a Piazza account — making it difficult to get to the course content and work.

Spark meaningful, ongoing
conversations with Milestones.

Piazza has no tool to prompt or remind students multiple times to make contributions.

With Harmonize, instructors can use multiple due dates or Milestones to help students remember deadlines and regularly contribute to discussions. You can use them in conjunction with notifications to set clear expectations, remind students of approaching due dates, and pull them back into the conversation — all of which promote ongoing engagement.

Milestones
Grading

Better, deeper integrations.

Harmonize allows you to more deeply integrate your different areas for questions into your LMS’s module layout. For example: Want questions around week 1 only?  Put that in your week 1 module. Want a specific live Q+A for one of your class sessions, you can put that in the week where it happens. Piazza handles this via an internal navigation that is custom to Piazza so it may be difficult for students and instructors to both find and make sure they’re submitting their questions in the correct place.

In Harmonize, you also have time-saving functionality, including:

  • LMS gradebook integration
  • Auto-grading for student participation
  • Integrations with OuriginalTurnitin and Unicheck to automatically check every post for originality

Multimedia Q&A promotes engagement

Harmonize directly supports uploading videos or recording them with your phone/webcam to be able to get video content seamlessly into your questions or your answers. Harmonize also supports annotation of videos and images to allow enhanced answering of questions with this type of content. Providing students a variety of ways to express themselves in Q&A promotes participation.
Promote social & inclusive learning
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Our goal is to be as accurate as possible, so if you feel there is something we should add, remove, or change, please let us know!

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Harmonize's Ultimate Online Collaboration Toolkit

rich multimedia icon Rich multimedia

Help students express themselves by posting images, video, audio, or text

flag icon Milestones

Help students see what’s expected of them, and when, so they make substantive, on-time contributions

student annotation icon Streamlined grading

Save time for instructors with LMS gradebook integration and autograding

Student facilitation

Give students control of discussions with tools that encourage them to contribute.

reactions & tagging icon Reactions & tagging

Improve participation with tools that bring everybody into the conversation

Image, Video & PDF Annotations

Provide interactive feedback and help students engage more deeply with content

Plagiarism detection

Integrate Harmonize with your plagiarism software to auto-detect unoriginal content

Chat

Enable students and instructors to communicate privately or in groups

Polls

Assess comprehension and knowledge with polls that engage the whole class

Q&A Boards icon Q&A boards

Let students answer each others’ questions with public boards

Harmonize integrates
with the tools you use today

Use Harmonize with any major LMS. Harmonize feels so familiar to instructors and students that there’s virtually no learning curve.
It’s simple to get started — Harmonize plugs right in!

To ensure academic integrity, Harmonize then integrates with the major plagiarism detection services, like Turnitin or Unicheck, to ensure that the students’ work is authentic.

See all integrations
Harmonize integrations
These institutions use Harmonize & see the results
10 x

increase in student-to-student collaboration

Read Case Study
56 %

increase in student engagement

Read Case Study
100 %

of instructors satisfied with discussions

Read Case Study

See Harmonize in Action

Learn how our online discussion and collaboration tools can elevate the learning experience at your institution.

Institutions of all sizes use Harmonize to improve student engagement, collaboration, and inclusivity in their online courses — all while saving instructors time. Harmonize seamlessly integrates with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle and D2L Brightspace to enrich discussions within already existing platforms. See it for yourself in a personalized demo!

In our 30-minute call, you will:

  • Learn how Harmonize creates a more engaging and inclusive experience for students (and instructors!)

  • Share your goals, and we’ll discuss how Harmonize can help you reach them

  • See Harmonize’s suite of modern discussion and collaboration tools in action

Fill out the form on this page to book a call with a member of our team and see Harmonize in action!