Would it be allowed to post a question as an exercise for students?

Question

So I'm a math teacher and would like my students to get comfortable with this community and to get familiar with this resource. To this end I've daydreamed about assigning them a problem, then posting it here as a question, requiring my students to submit answers.

All of the homework questions I've read have to do with the student who posts a question and receives help through answers. But that's not the situation here. My thinking is that the students can learn a lot by posting answers and then engaging with the community in all the usual ways: receiving feedback, editing their presentation, learning to use $\LaTeX$ in a way that clarifies concepts, &c. &c. &c. So it doesn't seem to run afoul of the homework policies here.

On the other hand, I don't really have a question about "how do I prove this foo is bar?" So I feel like it's a bit of a disingenuous use of the site.

Have any others tried this? Is there guidance on this? Does this strike you as an on-topic type of question to ask?

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Some comments suggested local sites, scoped instances of Stacks, &c. My response was:

To address a couple of the comments: either using our native CMS or a localized instance of a Stack would undercut the intent: to get students introduced to and participating in this community. I've got plenty of ways to get them to interact with each other and with me; it's blowing out those walls that I'm looking for, and guiding them through the process of becoming a productive member of an organization that, to their generation, will be as important as an MAA membership was/is to mine.

In other words, the explicit object of this (hypothetical) exercise is to get students' foot in the door here.

Answer 1

This is an interesting idea. I definitely see the appeal of getting learners of mathematics on this site. Used properly, Math.SE can be an incredibly effective resource for learning mathematics.

There is no rule preventing your posing a question and requiring your students to answer this question. There are a few odd interactions that may occur, though. I can think of three quickly, but I'm sure there are more.

1. For most easily approachable questions here (like I imagine that a question you would pose might be), there are very many users here who provide good answers, formatted well, very quickly.

   I foresee a scenario in which you ask a question and expect your students to answer it over the course of a week. But an hour after you ask it, a few great answers get added and upvoted. Then over the course of the week, your students try to give good, new answers, but the "good" answers are already there, and what should be said has already been said. Or perhaps a few of your students give good answers, but the latecomers face this problem.

   I suppose you might remedy this by posing several questions, as most questions could benefit from one more additional well-written answer.

2. If you ask a question with a sort of classic approach (like, say, some volume of revolution question in a calculus class, where there are distinguished methodologies that are very similar, then I foresee a problem where later answers are perceived as "copies" of earlier answers and get downvoted by the community.

   This might also be remedied by posing several questions.

3. There are some automatic vote-fraud detection scripts that run each day. Having a class all answer the same question or set of questions sounds like it might lead to a lot of inter-voting, which would tip off the vote-fraud script. It can be weird to gain reputation and give votes, and then have these discounted.

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But I would actually recommend that you take a slightly different approach. I think it might be a good experiment to ask your students to answer some question that's already here, instead of a question posed by you. If you're particularly worried about students finding an appropriate question, you could take on some of the scouting process yourself. There are so many unanswered questions, or questions that have answers but which would benefit from a new well-written answer. I can't say more on this without knowing what sort of class you're teaching, but I highly suspect that there are answerable unanswered questions corresponding to essentially every at least semi-popular tag here.

This has the benefit of having your students actually engage with the community itself in some way. I have a hard time imagining someone in the general community being annoyed (or even noticing, really).

As a final note, I would advise that your students learn something about LaTeX before attempting to answer.

No matter what you decide to do, good luck to you and your students.

Answer 2

Some problems I see with this proposal.

• I would be hesitant to go ahead with something like this unless this is agreed by a community and a rather detailed guidelines are created. (Will such questions be marked by a special tag? Will other users be allowed to answer them? Should we treat those questions differently with regards to voting and closing as duplicates?)
• I have difficulty to imagine how this would work for some basic course (let us say undergraduate level). I guess that about a half of the question which are reasonable problems for some basic mathematical subject might already have duplicates on this site. I would probably less opposed to something more advanced - since advanced questions and answers to them is the area in which the site is a bit lacking.
• I would not be surprised to see that often soon after posting a question somebody would comments that it is actually a duplicate. Which would mean that your students could then simply look at answers to other questions and use them to post their solutions. (Although in some cases I think it might be useful to post a more detailed version of already existing answer, which has a form of a hint of which purposely omitted some details which are expected to be filled in by a reader. A beginner would probably omit less details than an experienced user for whom many parts of the proof might be obvious.)
• If we consider the main purpose of this site to create a repository of interesting questions and good answers, I am not sure whether students learning about these things for the first time would contribute quality answers. I still think that it is useful if somebody who learns the subject tries to answer questions. I agree that this might help the answerer in learning the subject, especially if they receive some feedback to the answer in the comments. But if the rules are that only students of your course should answer your questions, this would probably reduce the number of good answers which other users - already more experienced in the subject - would be able to give.
• Using this site has a learning curve and learning how to use it correctly takes a lot of time. (Just have a look at the newbies who ask many questions with all of them getting downvoted and closed.) There is only limited time you can expect your students to spend on coursework for one particular course. (In fact, many universities even have some guidelines how much hours is student expected to spend on a particular class depending on the number of credits.) So you would have to subtract the time needed to getting acquainted with SE model and also specifics of this site from the time you expect them to spend studying the subject you are teaching.

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I have also tried to check whether something similar was discussed on other sites. I guess that some of the comments posted in discussions on other sites might also be useful for this discussion. However, I was only able to find this one: Stack Overflow as a class assignment?

Answer 3

It doesn't seem like anyone else has mentioned this yet, so I'll throw it out there for consideration:

Maybe have your students answer as community wiki? That way they don't receive reputation if their answer is upvoted, and so no one will accuse you of colluding to get points.

Asking the question as community wiki would probably be a good idea too, although I don't know how to do that.