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I am a community college math instructor. We use the Canvas learning management system for our online courses. Most of us use the built-in online discussion board in Canvas where students can share questions where I and other students can offer help and have discussions. The discussion platform works ok but is lacking in so many ways.

I am a long-time user of StackExchange and find it very helpful for helping me find solutions to my questions in many domains. It's helped me immensely and I hope I have helped others as well. I find it very useful to have a moderator and rating system that incentivizes correct solutions and professionalism.

It looks like StackExchange offers something called "Teams". I was thinking about moving my Canvas discussions to StackExchange. My idea is to create a domain for each class... say "My Differential Equations Class (Spring 2022)". Only my students would have access.

I would require a certain level of interaction every week for every student to ask questions and post responses to others. As the moderator, I could control a number of aspects including editing and promoting better discussion. It's nice that it is built into the service.

I'm not sure if this is a reasonable idea or not. Has anyone else here tried this in an academic class? I'm not even sure if "Teams" works like this. Do you have any feedback you can offer?

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    Afaik, the default version of Teams does not support MathJax. I don't know if it's possible to buy this option. Otherwise, there's Piazza. I used it for a few years.
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Jan 16, 2022 at 4:15
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    meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/406571/…
    – nick012000
    Jan 16, 2022 at 4:43
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    One more remark: Technical questions about Teams should be directed to meta.stackoverflow.com (e.g. you can ask there the availability of MathJax), and you might find of interest the above linked question by @nick012000. Here instead you might find feedback about the usage in class if someone has already tried.
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Jan 16, 2022 at 8:58
  • If this belongs anywhere here it is on meta since it about using the site itself.
    – Buffy
    Jan 16, 2022 at 14:19
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    @Buffy This is not for Meta, absolutely, because it's not about Academia SE, the public platform. Teams is in fact the enterprise product. As I said in the above, the technical questions should be asked on Meta Stack Overflow (not our meta; this is requested by the SE staff), but questions about the overall experience are perfectly fine here (e.g. we have questions about Piazza). And as I interpret this question, it's more about the overall experience.
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Jan 16, 2022 at 18:45

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