Question

When not all questions are questions.

Opening a question does not necesarily mean that someone has a difficulity; it may signify assitance / suggestions.

This particular entry is a case in point.

I think that both the scoring system as well as OpenStudy itself would benefit if there was a distinction between subject questions and suggestions, posting observations, etc.

Answer 1

oh where's a good question button when you need one huh @farmdawgnation ;) lol

Answer 2

I appreciate this suggestion. I'm sure the other staff members will have their two cents to add if they want to. But here are my thoughts...

There's a company called 37 Signals that produces some pretty successful software called Basecamp. I don't particularly like their product, and there are a lot of things about their company I disagree with. However, the one thing that I think they do really well is focusing their product toward one, defined goal. They do this by occasionally saying "no" to some nice-to-haves that don't fall in line with the main mission of their product.

In my opinion, this suggestion falls in that category for us. This would be a spectacular feature. I'm just not sure it falls in line with our main mission of helping students at their point of pain. If it doesn't do that, then it's an extra limb that's not servicing a majority of our users. For that reason, I don't see this happening unless we determine that the accuracy of SmartScore would be significantly improved by implementing a distinction like this.

Once again, just my two cents. You're more than welcome to use the red feedback tab on the left to file an official feature suggestion though!

Answer 3

farmdawgnation: I would like to invite you to pop over to MIT 6.00 Intro Computer Science here on OpenStudy. Check out my postings and those of some other folk over there. You will see that a considerable amount of "new questions" are anything but questions.

In my opinion a ***lot*** of perfectly good stuff that should not be lost ends up getting covered by new questions (a person can have only one question open). Even in a small group such as 6.00 one gets repeats to the same questions over and over and over again. My suggestion (together with others I have posted here) is one way to address this. It all boils down as to whether OpenStudy is after sheer traffic or having students find soltuions.

my 2c

Answer 4

@chribonn mathematics also had this kind of problem in the form of awesome tutorials some awesome users made...now these tutorials are buried and forgotten and i just feel bad about it :(

Answer 5

I beleive that OpenStudy has the opportunity to be different from a specialized forum. The suggestions I have made and those made by others all go a long way to allow openstudy to become specialised athelping students study together.