What do you think of a set of Stack Exchange sites for universities?

Question

So at my university (Aberystwyth) we all seem to have Q&A groups on Facebook for all the various courses and disciplines. Alongside societies, websites and all the rest.

I think it would be fantastic if universities could own their own set of Stack Exchange sites, setting up a separate exchange for each discipline. If this is done correctly it provides an education in Stack Exchange etiquette and removes (hopefully!) the vast majority of homework questions that seem to flood at the very least, Stack Overflow.

The best part about this is that it gives courses a great way to communicate their help on what I find the best platform ever for any kind of help. Of course it would require the universities (or at least institutes) to get behind this, as well as the lecturers and hopefully the alumni too.

What do you guys think of the idea? An overall yae or nae on the core of it?

I'm not flat out suggesting this is something that should be done, I'm wondering if it's: a) Something that should be done b) Something that would work well for both the universities & the Stack Exchange communities

What are your opinions?

Answer 1

We have tried this. I wish it could work. After all, our universities and educational institutions are where students and teachers meet to exchange knowledge that can be shared through the generations. It sounds like an ideal match.

Except that pedagogy isn't one of the strengths of our Stack Exchange Q&A model, in its current implementation.

If someone has an applied question about a specific programming problem (or whatever your major involves), the place to ask is on Stack Overflow. That's where people meet to share real-world solutions — and with that comes a sense that we're all building a long-lasting collection of the best possible answers to help those who come after.

But academic coursework is very temporal by nature. Students ask questions like "How do you terminate the loop in problem 7b" or "When is the link to the third lab going to be available?" A Q&A site focused on a specific body of coursework inevitably becomes about the coursework itself, where voting serves little purpose and there's little sense that we're building something lasting. Most questions get a dozen-or-so views, and then the issue is pretty much done.

To be fair, even if we restricted questions directly to the subject matter, students are transient by definition. You never quite create that core community needed to make a site "work." Questions get answered by a peer sitting next to you, but nobody is going back to make that answer great. The whole site is a bit of a grind just going through the motions. A question destined for the ages begs for that discussion between a "teacher" interacting with a group anxious to learn. That's the nature of pedagogy, and Stack Exchange (which is designed to avoid that back and forth discussion explicitly) does these subjects a terrible disservice. Any discussion forum would probably do a better job of it.