From our point of view, it could be interesting to add a "CHANNEL FEATURE" to STEEMIT. So, if someone is organizing different online courses or writes on different topics, he could split the posts in dedicated channels and users could decide to follow just one channel or the other.
This could be very useful if a University is proposing different courses in Steemit and users want to follow just one of them. With channels they won't have to follow all the courses.
Another interesting feature would be the possibility to save content (i.e. favourites), so that if you find some interesting article you don't have time to read there's no chance to lose it.
Steemit is at work on implementing a “communities” feature which will most likely resemble moderated sub-reddits. Hopefully they’ll arrive soon and serve that function.
I’d also recommend looking into ChainBB. The forum structure it creates could be very conducive to this type of endeavor.