How to teach Stack Overflow more efficiently? As evidenced by the numerous poorly asked questions by students on Stack Overflow, it is clear that many students have difficulty understanding how to ask questions there.

Even as teachers, we often seem to have difficulty asking questions on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites.

There have been flawed attempts with teachers assigning "ask a question and up vote another student's answer" which conflict the "vote on good material, not the user" (along with often asking really awful questions that get down voted and deleted).  Those questions tend to invoke the ire of the Stack Overflow employees and diamond mods and leave everyone involved with a sour taste in their mouth.

As students get out into the industry, they may find that having a good understanding of how to search and ask questions on Stack Overflow to be a valuable tool.  So, how do we teach how to use Stack Overflow?

Neglecting teaching how to use Stack Overflow in today's world is as bad as not teaching a student how to use a debugger and relying on the industry to teach the basics of software engineering and the tools available and expected to be used with a modicum of proficiency.

The lack of ability to teach Stack Overflow is also symptomatic of an inability to ask questions generally. Really, we need to teach students to ask the right questions, on Stack Overflow and elsewhere. How can I teach students to ask good questions, on and off Stack Overflow?
I don't think the core issue is that some students are bad at using Stack Overflow -- I view that more as a symptom of a deeper root problem. When somebody doesn't seem to be able to productively ask questions on Stack Overflow, I think that one or more of the following core issues are at play:


They don't really understand what it means to self-learn and independently research. After all, suddenly switching to independent work can be jarring after being hand-held through learning for the past N years.
They're not efficient communicators. Perhaps they care only about coding but not writing so ignored some of their teachers? Perhaps they were taught only to write essays or short answers where the main goal is to meet some word limit?
They're not familiar with online etiquette and norms.  In particular, when you ask for help in person, it's often ok to ask small questions or ask for general help when stuck. However, that kind of thing is often considered disrespectful, not just on Stack Overflow but many other technical forums -- you're expected to "front-load" your question so you don't waste people's time.
They're unwilling or too impatient to read. After all, Stack Overflow's help center defines exactly what's ok or not. (A perhaps more charitable interpretation is that not all students have fully tuned their ability to tell what must be carefully read vs what can be ignored.)
They're ineffective debuggers and so can't figure out a way to distill their issue into a specific question, even if they wanted to.
They don't know how to gracefully accept criticism and feedback when they inevitably do make a misstep.


So, given all this, I think trying to directly teach students to use Stack Overflow is probably a waste of time. There are deeper issues you need to tackle first. I would instead recommend doing some mixture of the below:


Incorporate more independent work into your curriculum (partly to make them less reliant on getting help from teachers and partly so they're more likely to run into questions worth asking).
Explicitly make good technical writing one of the goals of your class. Assign lab reports or writeups and grade students based on how effectively they've balanced completeness, concision, and clarity. (Perhaps this can be coordinated across different departments? Science classes often require lab reports, English/writing classes are a thing...). You could also tie this in with academia: make them write research papers.
Have your own discussion board where you answer questions. This way, students get some practice writing questions in a friendlier and more tolerant environment -- if somebody asks a poor question, you can prompt them for details to make the question a better one. As time progresses, get more strict: flat-out refuse to answer duplicate questions and the like.
Teach students a variety of debugging strategies. Show them how to use a debugger (and walk through several examples). Explain how to do printf debugging in a principled way. Teach them binary debugging. When they ask for help, teach them problem-solving strategies instead of directly helping them with their problem (where applicable). Teach them how to pin down and verify preconditions/postconditions/invariants. Teach them how to write (good) tests.
Make your students used to receiving feedback. Don't just grade their code based on correctness or whatever: grade on style, conduct code reviews... That said, your students are probably already used to being critiqued after spending N years in school, so perhaps there's nothing extra that needs to be done here...


(Unfortunately, I don't really know how you can rewire people so they'll actually read things. As I understand it, that's an unsolved problem in the general case.)

I realize these answers are sort of a cop-out -- you were asking how to teach people to effectively use Stack Overflow, and my answer was basically "don't use Stack Overflow". But in the long term, I do think it'll be for the best. The hope is that once they've graduated, they'll have learned the meta-skills needed to effectively and professionally communicate not just on Stack Overflow, but in other technical forums or at their workplace.