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GitHub goes to school

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Re: GitHub goes to school

#61

Post by Tehnix »

Many here seem to share the sentiment that universities should host their own solution and not use something like this. Perhaps I can provide a different viewpoint, as a student that recently got hired in IT support at my university.

Our current repository server is a thrown together solution that covers git/svn/hg. It's extremely ugly, has no features besides creating and deleting a repository and generally isn't very user friendly.

I immediately started thinking about how I could improve this area, and looked around for various things. As probably most here, open-source and self hosting came to mind as the first thing to look for.

I found GitLab and Gitolite and started reading a bit up on those and the pros and cons of using each, and both compared to GitHub.

What I found out

While self-hosting provides the ultimate control, there is one thing you're entirely forgetting; maintenance. This doesn't come by itself and requires both man hours and also the know-how to do this. The case as often is, it will be underprioritized, you will be left with an outdated version, and that will mean annoyances, bugs and possible new features you're missing will stack up. And that's just the case of nothing going wrong on the server you're hosting it in. There could potentially be data loss, server downtime, server interruption etc.

So what should we do then?

Let someone else take care of it. Throwing all these responsibilities over to someone like GitHub, whose sole function is to drive this service allows freeing up a lot of potentially wasted time, and also allows for the students to be using the newest and best tool for the job.

And for the case of something like GitHub specifically, I really think it's ridiculous to complain about it being proprietary, since it is besides the point entirely. You're teaching the students to use git and to collaborate together on projects. You're making the administrative task much easier with the workflow they provide.

You aren't teaching your students solely to use GitHub, it just removes a lot of extra cruft and allows the students to focus on the actual subjects of the course they are in, instead of having to wrestle with the tools they have to use.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#62

Post by mscman »

Tehnix wrote: post #61

Many here seem to share the sentiment that universities should host their own solution and not use something like this. Perhaps I can provide a different viewpoint, as a student that recently got hired in IT support at my university. Our current repository server is a thrown together solution that covers git/svn/hg. It's extremely ugly, has no features besides creating and deleting a repository and generally isn't ve…

There's a legal issue with universities though. While the research being done may be public, they could also involve private corporate entities, restricted data, or patentable information. A lot of people forget that, while universities are oftentimes public institutions, they're also very large bureaucracies. Most of them are very sensitive to how data is handled and published, as incorrect findings, proprietary code, and other leaks can be very costly.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#63

Post by Tehnix »

mscman wrote: post #62
Tehnix wrote: post #61

Many here seem to share the sentiment that universities should host their own solution and not use something like this. Perhaps I can provide a different viewpoint, as a student that recently got hired in IT support at my university. Our current repository server is a thrown together solution that covers git/svn/hg. It's extremely ugly, has no features besides creating and deleting a repository and generally isn't ve…

There's a legal issue with universities though. While the research being done may be public, they could also involve private corporate entities, restricted data, or patentable information. A lot of people forget that, while universities are oftentimes public institutions, they're also very large bureaucracies. Most of them are very sensitive to how data is handled and published, as incorrect findings, proprietary cod…

I think some of that can be solved with https://enterprise.github.com (which has an academic discount and offers an "unlimited campus-wide student license").

I can't clearly see how much maintenance you have to deal with though, so that might not be a viable suggestion without disregarding my original complaint.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#64

Post by mscman »

Tehnix wrote: post #63
mscman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a legal issue with universities though. While the research being done may be public, they could also involve private corporate entities, restricted data, or patentable information. A lot of people forget that, while universities are oftentimes public institutions, they're also very large bureaucracies. Most of them are very sensitive to how data is handled and published, as incorrect findings, proprietary cod…

I think some of that can be solved with https://enterprise.github.com (which has an academic discount and offers an "unlimited campus-wide student license"). I can't clearly see how much maintenance you have to deal with though, so that might not be a viable suggestion without disregarding my original complaint.

That's a good point, there are enterprise hosted offerings. I'm just pointing out that the sell to higher level university officials to switch off of internal infrastructure to "cloud" offerings (yes, yes, I realize that word is overused) can be rather difficult.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#65

Post by Bluestrike2 »

davexunit wrote: post #3

I was happy to see that my university decided to self-host a Gitlab server for CS students instead of using proprietary options like GitHub or Bitbucket. The students that set up the server learned from the experience, the instructors got around the problems they were having with Bitbucket's account limitations, and the new undergrads have a great platform on which to learn Git. I would encourage other educational in…

This begs the question of what you're looking to get out of a git/VCS setup. Unless you're forcing everyone to setup their own Gitlab instance, is your CS department looking to offer a handful of students limited experience with a single task? Or are you looking to use VCS to benefit all of your students during the entirety of their time in your program?

The entire idea behind using VCS in education is to enable better/deeper learning. Github lets students jump right into versioning their work and collaborating with classmates/instructors with minimal fuss and zero overhead. Not to mention that exploring Github can help introduce them to the open source community. Plus, they don't have to deal with IT department BS, worrying about when their old work will be deleted, or the myriad of other factors that can impact how students integrate git into their work.

From a departmental perspective, where time and resources are always stretched it's a no-brainer. Besides, at least Github isn't Blackboard. :shudders:

Re: GitHub goes to school

#66

Post by judk »

jackowayed wrote: post #50
judk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put your projects INA shared repo "school" Also, your schoolsw honor code is rather antiquated, and presumably it is used because your grades are based on copy-paste carbon-copy homework assignments :-(

Pretty much all CS departments don't want solutions for most assignments (open-ended final projects excepted) on GitHub for a simple reason: they reuse assignments term to term because it is incredibly difficult and work-intensive to develop an excellent CS assignment. While it might be possible in some courses, in many, it would be impossible to develop new assignments every term at the quality that they currently u…

Yeah, and grading homework is stupid and counterproductive and should be left behind in high school. College students can do better. They get $15-30/hr internships and then go back to school to do copy-pasta homework problems instead of meaningful projects, all because the schools are obsessed with "ranking" students to feed into the global elite.
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