Why and How Educators Use GitHub
alexeyza.com
Why and How Educators Use GitHub
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#2I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier.
I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for both me and the students, so everybody gets a little more done.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#3When I was teaching at General Assembly, I pushed to us to use Github for all of our assignments, workflow, etc. Homework turn-ins were pull requests, feedback was given via comments per-line that any instructor (or student) could make, etc.
The process to get students fluid at the basic flow took a few days, but after a while it was great and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. Any programming course using this is obvious, but I'd even do it for non-programming things if I could get the student trained on it in a minimal amount of time.
The only roadblocks with git are that there's so many basic ways to screw up, which are hard to fix. Let's say a student does a `git init` in their `~/code` folder that holds all of their git projects... and then makes a bunch of commits, and then can't figure out why they can't push to github. I wish there were some better failsafes to prevent such things, but they happened by accident once a week at least.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#4This is a timely post, Alexey.
Today, we released Classroom for GitHub: https://classroom.github.com
Classroom for GitHub automates repository creation and access control, making it easy for teachers to distribute starter code and collect assignments on GitHub.
You can read more about it on our blog: https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-wi...
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#5This is a timely post, Alexey. Today, we released Classroom for GitHub: https://classroom.github.com Classroom for GitHub automates repository creation and access control, making it easy for teachers to distribute starter code and collect assignments on GitHub. You can read more about it on our blog: https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-wi...
This sounds great and I'm sure it would resolve some of the barriers to entry for educators.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#6When I was teaching at General Assembly, I pushed to us to use Github for all of our assignments, workflow, etc. Homework turn-ins were pull requests, feedback was given via comments per-line that any instructor (or student) could make, etc. The process to get students fluid at the basic flow took a few days, but after a while it was great and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. Any programming course using th…
Thanks for sharing your experience!
In fact, the blog post doesn't include all the details, but some of the educators we interviewed were not from CS. You can see a table describing all the participants in our research paper (the link is provided at the end of the blog post).
Just like you, I believe it is completely possible to use this for non CS classes, and still gain all the benefits. However, like you said, there should be a basic understanding of Git.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#7I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier. I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for…
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually, I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for students to commit PR with corrections and suggestions to the course website and material). I really love our setup now, but it took some figuring out the best way to do it. BTW, if anyone is interested here the course website (just as our example):
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#8I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier. I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for…
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually, I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for students to commit PR with corrections and sugg…
GitHub Pages might be a good solution for you course website, it does HTML templates and allows you to use markdown.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#9I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier. I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for…
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually, I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for students to commit PR with corrections and sugg…
I am definitely feeling that: I've already had to do some reorganizing as I discover that some of my initial decisions weren't perfect, as to organizing the class repo.
By the way, your article has encouraged me to get the students using issues for eg. homework questions they'd normally email, thanks for that.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually, I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for students to commit PR with corrections and sugg…
GitHub Pages might be a good solution for you course website, it does HTML templates and allows you to use markdown.
Yes, you're probably right. I didn't want it to include any HTML (to make it easy for anyone to contribute to course website), but perhaps there is a way to use a simple Markdown for GitHub pages.