How can Quora be used for a massively open online course (MOOC)?

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Kahlil Corazo

I've dabbled (as a student) with the following:

• Steve Blank's How to Build a Startup at Udacity
• Stanford's Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship

The medium for interaction between students is simply terrible--circa 2002 online forurms.

Quora has solved the biggest problem of forums as avenues for collaborative learning:

• Prioritizing questions with more interests (via follows)
• Making better content more visible (via upvotes)
• Rewarding behavior that promotes sharing and distribution of knowledge (the entire gamified ecosystem)

I have also a lot of interest in Quora as a teacher. I experimented with the Flipped Classroom for undergrads, which uses a lot of components of MOOC. When you orchestrate a flipped classroom, the bulk of your work consists of the following:

• Curating content
• Creating custom content
• Manual "gamification" - using the same techniques as Quora et al to ensure students work hard (eg, constructs of small victories and social pressure/rewards)
• Coaching

As a teacher, what you want most is to have as many people benefit from your work as possible. The content you curate and create will be useful to a lot more people using the distribution capabilities of Quora (or whatever else will be invented in the future). And it will be enriched by the community.

Here's what I plan to do as a teacher:

• Ask students to ask me in Quora rather than email. They will probably get answers from several perspectives and from people with deeper expertise
• Curate and create content in Quora rather than in the class website. Ask and answer questions for students to learn from. There is a good possibility of giving them perspectives from other people.

The coaching and in-class workshops cannot be replaced (yet) by an online solution. But all those long emails and blog posts should be placed where they are reusable and open to inputs from the universe of knowledge.

Here's what I hope for as a student of MOOCs:

• Get Quora into the MOOCs I'm attending and all other MOOCs now and in the future (or at least for them to copy Quora and not forums from the 2000's). (Adam D'Angelo, please please to talk to Chuck Eesley and Sebastian Thrun)

Those are two possible sources of revenue for Quora: MOOCs and teachers like me.

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