The Emergence of GitHub as a Collaborative Platform for Education

Abstract

The software development community has embraced GitHub as an essential platform for managing their software projects. GitHub has created efficiencies and helped improve the way software professionals work. It not only provides a traceable project repository, but it acts as a social meeting place for interested parties, supporting communities of practice. Recently, educators have seen the potential in GitHub's collaborative features for managing and improving-perhaps even transforming-the learning experience.In this study, we examine how GitHub is emerging as a collaborative platform for education. We aim to understand how environments such as GitHub-environments that provide social and collaborative features in conjunction with distributed version control-may improve (or possibly hinder) the educational experience for students and teachers. We conduct a qualitative study focusing on how GitHub is being used in education, and the motivations, benefits and challenges it brings.

Collaborative Strategy for Teaching and Learning Object-Oriented Programming course: A Case Study at Mostafa Stambouli Mascara University, Algeria

“…When the group is made up of more than two members in small or big groups, different tasks could be proposed according to the collaborative learning activities scenarios or scripts [40]. The distribution of those tasks might be automated in traditional teaching environments [41]. Another technique is TPS (Think-Pair-Share).…”

Using GitHub Classroom To Teach Statistics

“…Previous work has shown that GitHub can be used for educational purposes across a range of subjects, class sizes, and instructor knowledge of GitHub (Zagalsky et al, 2015). The contribution of our work is to provide a concrete and easy-to-implement workflow for instructors who want to bring version control into their classroom.…”

“…We have used student feedback to construct a separate guide to Git and GitHub for students, so that instructors unfamiliar with version control do not have to create their own teaching materials. Our paper also discusses potential ways of introducing and motivating version control to students, which adds to the discussion in Zagalsky et al (2015) about various motivations instructors have for using GitHub for education. Our hope is that our guides serve as a starting point for instructors to use GitHub, who will then modify and improve our workflows for different class settings.…”

GitHub use in public administration in Canada: Early experience with a new collaboration tool

“…The specific collaboration platform we focus on here is the digital project web service GitHub, principally used for hosting collaborative application and web development projects (Bell and Beer 2015;Gousios, Pinzger, and van Deursen 2013;Peterson 2013;Storey et al 2014) though increasingly being applied to a range of digital project purposes in recent years (Lawson 2013;McMillan 2013b) including collaboration on text documents (Longo and Kelley 2015;Lowry, Curtis, and Lowry 2004;Voelter 2013;Zagalsky et al 2015).…”