My organization needs to provide lots of public learning tutorials to our community. I wanted to validate that we can use Discourse as an ‘educational center’ rather than building something from scratch. Can you confirm if 1-3 are possible out-of-the-box with Discourse?
Embed videos directly in threads so users can play them in the thread
Embed guides directly in threads so user can read guides (that links to another website) in the post
Use Discourse as an index of tutorials where our admins can creates unique pages to host tutorials on a specific topic and comments can be made against the content. I’m thinking something like YouTube, where the video is the main CTA for the user and comments below are all related to that content (any examples of active forums that do this today would be helpful!). See something like Coursera: Q&A with Raaid Ahmad of Blockchain @ Facebook | Coursera Community.
Here on Meta you’ll find a huge array of different features, customisations and use case examples that could apply to your situation. I suggest you browse through plugin, theme, community and howto first, then if you have any specific questions, there are many helpful folks here who’d be happy to help you.