It’s 1:30 a.m. and a student is working on a math assignment when he or she gets stuck on a problem. Deciding to post the question to the class Compass discussion page, the student knows that the chances of receiving a response by the afternoon deadline are not very good.

Thanks to “Piazza.com”:http://piazza.com/, an online platform for Q & A sessions between college students and instructors in a classroom setting, this situation can be resolved quickly and efficiently.

With Piazza.com, instructors can improve the educational experiences of students and make their lives easier, said Phil Soffer, vice president of operations for Piazza.com.

“Piazza was created for students who have questions on homework assignments or want more background knowledge on a specific subject,” said Soffer. “Professors can set up the class page and the service reduces the number of repetitive questions that the students ask … Students can post a question and the answer is created collaboratively by the other students and the class instructor in the Wikapedia-like group session.”

The founder of the company, Pooja Sankar,came up with the idea when she was an undergraduate student in computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the 1990s. As one of three women in the computer science department, she was afraid to ask questions in class and approach the fellow students for help on homework assignments. She saw the students collaborating with each other on the assignments, but as a woman raised in a traditional Indian background, she felt she could not approach them and felt academically inferior.

Sankar came to the United States for graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park and worked as a software engineer for Facebook, Kosmix and Oracle before creating Piazza.

Piazza, which comes from the Italian word “plaza,” is a place for people to come together. Sankar liked that the analogy illustrates how people can go online in a way that facilitates friendly interaction.

“She wanted to create a company that can help people who have barriers to participating in the educational experience, and create an exchange between students and their instructors,” Soffer said.

With the platform, students can come to class and use the program during that time, but it is most active in the evening when most students are doing their homework, he said.

“It can be used if students get stuck on a problem or find something interesting about the class subject,” he said. “The platform is a real-time system that generates answers from student questions.”

Created in 2009, and based in Palo Alto, Calif., this free student service has spread to more than 1,000 schools, including Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, MIT, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Michigan, Iowa, Purdue and the University of Illinois.

The company saw rapid production throughout the year and by January 2011, more than 3,000 different instructors across the nation were using the platform for their classes.

In the future the company hopes to expand outside of universities.

“We hope to reach out to anyone who is interested in the educational experience, but not necessarily a college student,” Soffer said. “You can download a lot of college courses on iTunes, but you just listen to the course and don’t really get the experience of ‘learning-by-doing.’ With Piazza, people can still get the educational experience and ask questions about the topics that interest them.”

A page for each participating school has been created and students are able to see what classes are using the service. At the University, 22 classes are using Piazza, the majority of which are computer science and engineering classes. However, there is still an option to request a class page if it is not already on the school page.

“If students want to create a page for a class, all they have to do is gather 15 students in that class and request a page for that class, and then we will email the request to the instructor to set it up,” Soffer said.

Will Setchell, University alum and software engineer for Piazza,said the company is proving to be very promising and a great resource for all college students.

“The overall goal of the company is to make education easier for people who want to learn,” Setchell said. “While we target mostly engineering and computer science classes because they are the early adopters, the platform can be used to enhance the education across all subjects of interest.”

Chase Geigle, junior in Engineering, worked at the company as a summer intern and is now spending his fall semester there as a software engineer.

“It’s very exciting to work at a startup company that is moving so quickly in just a few short months,” Geigle said. “Everything is very paced and well thought out and done very quickly.”

Geigle, who built the University campus page and integrated the page buttons on the forms, is currently enabling more features to the site and making sure everything is functioning correctly.

“Building the campus page was rewarding because I got to see something go from non-existent to live in a very short amount of time and still produce a quality program,” he said.

Geigle said he is excited about the direction that the company is moving.

“I like that there are more options at Illinois using Piazza beyond math and science, like liberal arts,” he said. “It’s great to see that there are so many people willing to use this resource to show multiple viewpoints to classroom discussions.”

The size of the classrooms using Piazza can vary, said Geigle.

“The class can be a large lecture or a smaller discussion,” said Geigle. “But the only thing that matters is to use Piazza as the best way to get questions answered.”