<p>I am sympathetic to the general idea of capitalizing on SE as a teaching tool but am concerned about the potential for abuse in this case.  Two people acting in collusion can easily generate thousands of points of reputation for each other merely by writing a lot of repetitive junk and upvoting each other's posts.  We can catch that behavior, but if the students are smart--and many are--they can mask this behavior through extensive voting for others as well, making automatic detection difficult.</p>

<p>This is not theoretical speculation.  It has happened (and, in one notable case, is allowed to continue because it's benign and the perpetrators appear to have a net positive effect on the site, although as a result one of them has a noticeably inflated reputation).</p>

<p>Requiring participation also threatens to reduce the quality of posts, especially towards the end of the semester (when demand usually goes up anyway), as procrastinators ever more desperately throw stuff on our proverbial wall hoping to reach the required minimum.  As a moderator I don't welcome the additional janitorial work that would entail and would look extremely unfavorably on anyone I suspected of instigating this.  In the worst case, you could wind up having no access at all to CV within your institution.</p>

<p>I'm sure there are creative and constructive uses of this site for pedagogy, in addition to the obvious one of offering it as a resource for learners.  If you want to go in this direction, consider making participation <em>optional</em> and offer extra credit for answers, comments, or questions that in <em>your</em> opinion are especially worthy.  In short, please do not delegate to this community your duty to motivate and assess the performance of your students.</p>
