Question

I and others have on numerous occasions suggested functionality that will allow OpenStudy to be more of a study portal rather than a forum.

I am doing MIT OpenCourseWare 6.00. I got stuck on a problem and decided to use google. Google took me to http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduction/.

Aside from registering I only clocked a few hours on this site. I would like to suggest that the people behind openstudy have a look. The ability to classify content around lectures and submit homeworks for peer review and find related materials is something I find very useful.

Answer 1

i support a part of this idea :P

Answer 2

Hello @chribonn, thank you for your post - greatly appreciated. I hope to explain why we have stayed away from this particular type of functionality here - but feel free to respond if you feel it doesn't address all your points.

In basic terms, OpenStudy is a community that values the idea of one user helping another. The premise is that both the asker and the answerer learn through this method. For instance, we have seen how users who have just learned Algebra are often the *best* people to teach it to someone, and it also helps them develop mastery of the subject by trying to teach it to someone else. This kind of 'peer to peer' teaching and learning is the very reason OpenStudy has succeeded to this point.

The main issue with your proposal is that once you introduce content, this part of OpenStudy becomes less important and relevant. Additionally, while we would love for OpenStudy to be all things to all people, there are limits to what we can provide well. Thus, our focus has always been on making our core offering (peer to peer help) be as helpful and useful to our users as possible.

Also, there is a delicate balance between helping someone learn and doing their work for them. By requesting that users post one question at a time, we have found that we can better teach that user on the issues they are having problems with - as opposed to a complete review of their entire assignment. The ultimate goal of OpenStudy in this case would be to provide the help needed to the student to complete the assignment themselves once they learn the concepts and processes from others on OpenStudy.

I absolutely love some of the ideas you have listed here, and am more than willing to discuss them with you further. Please let me know your thoughts when you have a moment, thank you!

Answer 3

@cshalvey, your format works very well in those situation in which there is a consistent lot of activity; it works no so well at those situation were the participation is not is not very active. This can be either seasonal (summer months) or because the module is not so popular. You find the same situation in MIRC chat rooms.

Having functionality such as the library where content found by those in the course could be put up is one of my suggestion. Having moderators who, have ***reasonable*** authority to manage a section are two areas of improvement. Who becomes what when could be based on the smartscore value. Different sections can therefore adapt (think of natural selection here) depending on how many people are in a module and what the module is all about.

For example, all those who take MIT 6.00 do not do it for any reason other than personal self gain. No cheating possible here.

In MIT 6.00 I was researching the Napsack problem. I found a video on youTube and decided to write the python equivalent to it. I posted it. Where is it now? Where is the copying/cheating here?