If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem. All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of universities not offering a programming course.

The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application.

Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).