The Emergence of GitHub as a Collaborative Platform for Education
Our paper as presented at the 18th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 18th 2015.
The Emergence of GitHub as a Collaborative Platform for Education Alexey Zagalsky, Joseph Feliciano, Margaret-Anne Storey, Yiyun Zhao, and Weiliang Wang 1 GitHub logos and images are owned by GitHub, inc. alexeyza.com/pdf/cscw15.pdf
3 “After just seven years on the net, GitHub now boasts almost 9 million registered users. Each month, about 20 million others visit without registering... GitHub is now among the top 100 most popular sites on earth.” [wired.com]
“Some of [the material] is shared with the world, and some of it is shared with other instructors of other universities... We’re versioning all of it.” 14 Reuse and Sharing
“I think the repository has something like 200 stars on GitHub right now and as far as I can tell most of those stars are from people who didn’t take the course.” 15 Reuse and Sharing
“You really see the full history of how the document comes into being, including all the discussions, the former versions. I can monitor who’s active, working in certain teams, which is also handy, practical.” 16 Transparency of Activity
“This is very much what people use these days in [statistics], and so I actually consider it a completely valid pedagogical goal in and of itself.” 18 Industry Relevance
With course materials hosted on GitHub, students and educators were able to suggest course improvements by submitting an issue or a Pull- Request. 22 Hosting Course Material
“Students have separate repositories, and it’s private so that people cannot see what they are working on.” “When you do a pull, you can see what the others in the seminar are doing. For example, a student wrote a python script, and others want to use it, so they can just grab it and use it.” 23 As a Submission Platform
“... some documentation on best practices or some kind of shared knowledge base that would say here’s what so-and-so at UC Irvine is doing with GitHub.” 25 Need for Best Practices
“To get the most out of GitHub, you need to understand Git... If you use it the right way it is simple, but somehow with Git you end up with conflicts, and if you don’t understand it, it’s magic.” 26 Barriers to Entry
“Copyright is a big issue. For instance, we are working with a novel. In Canada, that novel is in the public domain so it can be accessed online, but not in the United States.” 27 External Restrictions
“The thing that I think was missing... was more management for the administrator: assigning people to teams, assigning teams to repositories, finer grained permission control” 28 Large Scale Management
30 Why How Challenges Reuse and sharing, Transparency of Activity, Encourage participation, Industry Relevance Hosting course material and as a Submission platform. Need for Best practices, Barriers to entry, External restrictions (copyright), Management
The GitHub way supports the workflow, adds transparency, brings awareness, and promotes a culture of collaboration. GitHub for the rest of us by Jon Udell 33 The GitHub Way
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