It's really about providing the appropriate forums and helping people identify them. It's not really appropriate to waste class time repeatedly explaining conce

It's really about providing the appropriate forums and helping people identify them. It's not really appropriate to waste class time repeatedly explaining concepts that 95% of the class already understands. If a student is struggling with this, they need remedial help, which can be obtained by contacting the professor directly during office hours/after class/however it works at your school, contacting a tutor, finding a study group or downgrading to a lower-level course, among other options. A stray "Wait, what does that mean again?" is no problem and actually probably helps a lot of people in the class who are too shy to speak up, but you can't let class time be monopolized by slow students. The slow students shouldn't be ashamed and should go get the help they need, they just need to be directed to the appropriate venue. The same is true in programming generally. We need to make it easy to identify the appropriate forum for the issue one is having and then we need to encourage them to seek resolution there. A way to improve SO would be to make it more obvious that the only questions that should be asked should be questions that are not Googleable, give a link to a "how to Google for programming help" guide, and when questions that violate this rule get added, include a direction to a helpful beginner's chat room or something along with the closure message.