Learning partners -- social network for collaboration

one liner: offer a social network for people that would like to learn a new skill that offers suggestions for people to learn or work with.

When you are learning a new skill or learning about a new subject, it is very hard to do on your own. This is one of the advantages of being in a college environment, where you have classmates where you can form study groups with people in your dorm when an exam comes up. When you have a question, you can ask your study buddy. Studying with someone else would also help give you motivation to continue with your commitment. It is also a great way of making friends with someone... small talk only gets you so far. Matchmaking online (as far as I know) has been limited to dating, but there should be ways of extending it to other fields.

One natural area where this would help would be a language exchange, where two people that are good in two separate languages can help each other get better at each other's language. English learning makes is a very large market in asian countries. There would definitely be ways of monetising it.

For implementation, there are many considerations, but many things can be copied (or learned) from the online dating websites. It should be the easiest to integrate with facebook where people already have their information and their network of people. I think there will be a significant portion of people that will use the service as a way of meeting the opposite gender, but I'm not sure how that will affect the service.
This is still a brainstorm in progress.....

I just read an interesting piece on how to get learn things well, maybe it will be able to connect with this idea.