How to deploy a StackExchange-style question and answer site for a university subject? Problems with discussion boards: After being involved with StackExchange for a couple of years, I've really grown to despise standard discussion boards. All those meandering threads, no commenting, no ability to edit questions to improve them, inadequate cross-referencing of questions, no markdown support, no voting for good answers; no rss subscription options, the list goes on...

Educational context: I have interacted with a few course management systems that include discussion boards for students to ask questions. These systems also lack most of the great features of the StackExchange model of Q&amp;A. 

Question


Is there a way of deploying a StackExchange-style Q&amp;A site for a university subject?
Are there any examples of people doing this?
Does anyone know whether StackExchange themselves have considered this market?


Initial thoughts

I realise that there are open source clones of stack exchange in existence. However, my concern is that they take a bit of effort to setup.


Ideally any system should be very simple to deploy for the lecturer, and easy to learn for the student.
Yes it's possible. Yes it's been done. There are plenty of StackExchange clones such as OSQA to use - there's a question over on meta-stackoverflow that lists them. You can pretty much pick your favourite platform, and there will be a StackExchange clone for it.

But:

You might well find that take-up rates are very very low (maybe one in 20 if you're lucky). And you need a lot of people to give a Q&amp;A site enough critical mass to sustain itself.

They're all reasonably easy to use, for the end-users. As to how hard they are to install and maintain, that's a question of the kit and talent you have available. If you've already got a server serving Django apps, then OSQA is easy. If you've got a *AMP stack, then any of the PHP clones should be pretty easy.  Installation and management is the really easy part of the process. Drumming up, and sustaining, partcipation is the really hard part.