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1. Introduction
The ever increasing volumes of data and information shared on social media and collaborative sites have become a rich and valuable source of knowledge for a wide spectrum of users’ needs. When there is a need to learn about a new subject or to solve a specific problem, by nature people look for fast access to relevant information that would help them address that need. As such, very often they tend to consult relevant web communities, such as social media, online forums, and Community Question Answering (CQA), traditionally known as Question Answering (Q & A) sites, which gather contributions from a large array of users with different levels of expertise. Recent years, therefore, have witnessed the emergence and growing popularity of these sites among learners and educational communities, particularly students in higher education who seek to find help with their course work and material. According to Pearson’s latest annual report on the use of social media for teaching and learning (Seaman and Tinti-Kane, 2013), the use of social media in higher education institutes has been on a steady rise in recent years. This includes the use of a wide range of social media websites and technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Q & A sites, such as the StackExchange[1] and Quora[2].
There is currently a debate among teachers and educators with regards to the pedagogical approach of the Q & A sites to “helping” people and its productivity and contribution to real learning[3] [4] and whether students should be encouraged to avail of the type of help provided by these systems[5]. This debate seems to demonstrate mixed opinions which, from our perspective, are driven by the fact that the ultimate goal of responsible teachers and educators is to facilitate the learning of their students in an active manner, help them achieve the learning outcomes and therefore the skills which their study programmes are designed for. Notwithstanding this debate, and rather than looking at the issue of students use of these Q & A sites with caution, we believe there is an opportunity here for teachers and educators to learn about and discover various aspects of this learning behaviour that can potentially help enhance their own teaching approaches. The vast amount of data and...