RE: Two years on from first asking the question, I would like to ask it again ...."What would happen if a Student was to publish their Coursework and Dissertation on Steemit?"
I disagree here.
I will not release my own scientific publications on Steem, and for varied reasons. First of all, because they are all already open access on the arxiv, that is a medium widely used in my field (in contrast to Steem). Second, because only peer-review matters. Steem is far from being peer-reviewed so that anything that would be released here (as a state-of-the-art scientific article) will be meaningless for getting fundings, being promoted, etc....
This being said, let me raise the question: why do we need a blockchain for peer reviewing? Please check scipost, for instance. This does exactly what you want, but without a blockchain. In addition, the money incentive for releasing scientific publications make no sense. Reputation is what matters for scientists (please check @pevo).
However (let's keep a positive touch for the end), what Steem can do is to incentive scientists to make their work accessible, in layman's terms, to a wider audience. This is where Steem can play a major role: science communication. And this is what @steemstem targets. Once you will get many (reputed) scientists from many different fields on board, this will be the time to discuss the next steps. Before that, anything would be premature and there are better fights that are worthy, in my opinion.
I forgot to answer to the OP, and sharing courses and dissertation is a different story. As soon as they are shared in a valuable way (with science communication in mind), this is something that we at SteemSTEM will support.
I don't think steem in its current form will be suitable for scientific publications. I wont publish on it either. Like you said when it comes to actual research the reputation matters more than money. What I imagine is like a journal ecosystem powered with blockchain. Though, I don't see much of a difference if say nature was maintaining records on blockchain. Given there already exists a system in scientific process which maintains a public database, we read, store and build on each others research, impact factor and work itself builds the reputation. Blockchain would add nothing more than a different data management system. I thought about incentives however for 2 reasons. When it comes to basic research many people I know did not pursue it because it is ought to pay you less. So it may motivate some of those people. But I guess one can argue that if their motivation is money they might as well be in industrial research which pays higher and let academic research be driven solely by passion. Then I think reporting negative data, reporting non reproducibility of some published experiments, data manipulation and plagiarism should be strongly demotivated. Motivating more people to report such things plus lowering the reputation of offender digitally should come handy. Though, I think I kind of disagree with myself here in incentives. Because adding a monetary reward would not only destroy the essence of science but will rather create a more hostile environment as well . So I guess after contemplating a bit, I have come to a conclusion that I mostly agree with you.
But the monetary incentives are not sufficient to pay salaries. And the little extras make no differences, especially when the cons are put into the equation (no peer-review, no recognized journal, etc.).
I have writing for years papers on null results. This is something well accepted in particle physics. Papers on unconfirmed excesses are also being written, and results not reproducing former experimental results are also published. I think this is a community-thing where scientists should just also consider negative results and things like that (from which we actually learn a lot).