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Classroom for GitHub
- reptation 11y agoAs a teacher of non-CS courses, it's nearly drool-worthy as an alternative to Blackboard but the private Repo's are not free and this is a deal breaker.
- tarebyte 11y agoGitHub Education provides free private repositories for educators. You can check it out here: https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new
- bachmeier 11y agoAs I recall, that's only for use in the classroom, to get students hooked. If you're doing research, or anything other than teaching a class, you pay for private repos. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Bitbucket gives you a free unlimited account if you sign up with a .edu email address. [Edit: You actually get five free repos. Still limited and not at all the deal you get with Bitbucket.]
- capnrefsmmat 11y agoNo, GitHub gives you 5 free private repositories for any educational use if you sign up with an academic email. I use mine for research.
- johndbritton 11y agoResearchers are eligible too.
- Navarr 11y agoI don't think this does anywhere near half the things Blackboard does. Google Classroom is a much more powerful alternative to that.
- edgyswingset 11y agoBlackboard is an actual piece of shit, though. It's slow, still has trouble with most browsers, and doesn't get any of its features right. The four years of crap I had to put up with for that site are still fresh in my mind. To be a bit more solution-oriented, most students and teachers don't care about the majority of what BB offers. They want: * Upload and administer documents * Assign grades to assignments * Access Control to the above * Speed across all browsers for the above If Github can get these right, I don't see why they couldn't have a strong offering.
- ascagnel_ 11y agoBlackboard is the perfect example of buying by checkboxes: it ticks the most boxes, but since the person who buys the software rarely has to use it (if it all), they don't care that it does all those things terribly.
- dublinben 11y agoIt would be nice if respecting student privacy was one of the main requirements of a system like this.
- jessaustin 11y agoSerious question: what aspects of student privacy can't be covered by "Access Control" mentioned above?
- edgyswingset 11y agoI could see a company doing something shady like collecting metrics on students across different types of classes to eventually sell to someone. I can't for the life of me understand why that kind of data would be valuable, but I'm sure someone could make use of student metrics for advertising purposes.
- jessaustin 11y ago
- sytse 11y agoOur GitLab.com has free private repo's. Many universities use GitLab Community Edition so that students don't have to use a third party server.
- qrohlf 11y agoI developed a similar system when I was teaching a web development course [1] last year. It's open-sourced at https://github.com/qrohlf/gradebook https://github.com/qrohlf/gradebook for anyone interested. [1] http://webdev.qrohlf.com http://webdev.qrohlf.com
- johndbritton 11y agoThis is great, thanks for sharing.
- johndbritton 11y agoClassroom for Github automates repository creation and access control, making it easy for teachers to distribute starter code and collect assignments from students. There's more info on our blog: https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-with-classroom-for-github https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-wi...
- octref 11y agoWould private repos created by my teacher count toward my 5 private repo limit of GH education?
- johndbritton 11y agoNo, these repositories are created in the teacher's organization account. Totally separate from your individual repositories.
- jasonmorton 11y agoI think this is absolutely the way forward for technical courses (where the prof and maybe students already know how to use git, or can be expected to learn). A course is kind of like a web app with a lot of common functionality. Too bad most LMSs seem to think we want to write our course in a little text box with no version control (even newer ones like Canvas make this assumption).
- CoryG89 11y agoI agree, I think students should be learning how to set up version control very early on in 101 level classes. If for nothing else, it will preserve their work and ensure nothing is lost. I wish I had all of my work from University in git. I still have a lot of it, but things were inevitably lost because I did not use any kind of version control. Also I like Markdown as a format for taking notes when you want to type them. Github renders these very nicely and its very convenient. However, I wish they had support for latex equations (inline or block).
- deskamess 11y agoI think this is the 'backend' for courses, but there has to be a better frontend for authoring of assignments, viewing those assignments, and viewing and optionally grading the completed assignment.
- DasIch 11y agoWay forward? Stuff like this has existed for years already just not as well marketed maybe. At my university we typically use a single shared svn repository. Permissions restrict which directories are readable and writeable to students/groups. Performing reviews is a problem but apart from that it works perfectly even in classes with hundreds of students.
- andreasklinger 11y ago@GitHub: I love the idea - would love to try it - but is there a way for me to define which organizations it has access to ? I cant give access to my work or client organizations just to tire-kick a new app
- johndbritton 11y agoYes, you can set up 3rd party access restrictions on your organization accounts and manage access for each organization independently. https://help.github.com/articles/about-third-party-application-restrictions/ https://help.github.com/articles/about-third-party-applicati...
- dberg 11y agosame here. I see people being very cautious about enabling this when its defaulted to enable the organizations i have access to. There must be a way to restrict this to certain organizations no ?
- Someone1234 11y agoWhat's the cost of this? And who pays it (e.g. each individual student, the school/department/grader, etc)? I like GitHub a lot, but I will say they can be rather pricey. $7/month for their smallest private plan, you can literally run your own VM in the cloud (e.g. on AWS/Azure) for that amount (and run Gitlab), get a terabyte of cloud storage (which you can store hundreds of Git repositories in), or go to one of their competitors. And, yes, this absolutely does require a private repository if you want to avoid cheating.
- johndbritton 11y agoIt's totally free. Teachers can request free private repositories at https://education.github.com/discount https://education.github.com/discount
- deskamess 11y agoThis needs some videos to show what it can do. Not many teachers know what GitHub is and if I wanted to suggest this as a possible option I could not explain it to them. Maybe a video showing the creation of an assignment and sending it out (url via email, is it?), students completing the assignment, and teachers looking over a completed assignment. If that is a poor example of what this does then I missed the point entirely.
- nickstinemates 11y ago> Not many teachers know what GitHub is That's rather unfortunate, as more and more of the people putting their degree to work definitely need to know what it is, especially in start ups.
- kennydude 11y agoMy university showed us 'RCS'...
- johndbritton 11y agoThanks for the suggestion, we're working on more and better documentation for teachers.
- eegilbert 11y agoThis looks great, as I would expect. However, a major hurdle at US universities is FERPA [1]. FERPA (but really the fear of litigation under FERPA) is one reason why universities host their own software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_Privacy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_...
- anonetal 11y agoI fully agree -- people underestimate this issue. We recently had a long discussion among the CS faculty on using GradeScope (a software for grading paper exams). It looks great and I would love to use it, but the feedback was that the University would not approve of it for privacy reasons. Even using Google forms is problematic for that.
- kendallpark 11y agoI wish this existed when I was a student. Immediately forwarded to favorite CS prof.
- sternenseemann 11y agoOne thing thing I dislike about GitHub's student/teaching services is that they are all in a centralized manner and seem like half-commercial.
- alexeyza 11y agoI posted a blog post yesterday on Why on How educators use GitHub, and thought it might be interesting to some of the people here as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256868
- 9fb29947 11y agoThey should join forces with Khan Academy.
- carlosdp 11y agoThis is awesome! The only thing missing in using Github properly for a classroom environment was repo management / isolation.
- davexunit 11y agoGitHub's student SaSS package is the antithesis of educational. Students cannot learn, modify, and share any of this software. I see nothing but praise for GitHub in almost everything they do, but from my perspective they are doing great harm and have now directed their attention at the future generation of hackers. CS students need hackable software, free software, to learn from and build things with.
- kolinko 11y agoSo students should not use Google, because Google is not open source? How about Stack Overflow? Or closed-source hardware? While it's important for students to be able to learn modify and share software, it's obvious that they cannot rely on open software alone.
- fsqcds 11y agoHow to actually try it? I've created free organization under my GitHub profile, but Classroom still says me "You’re not managing any organizations yet."
- eurrutia 11y agoClassroom for GitHub needs access to your organization. Grant access in Settings | Applications | Authorized applications | Organization access
- jpolitz 11y agoI use Github in my courses, and I was excited when I saw this. Three responses: 1. The permissions screen immediately irked some of my collaborators – why does this need access to _everything_, including deleting repositories that already exist? They pointed out that if one privacy/security-conscious student makes a stir about this in an undergrad course, it's all of a sudden a potentially huge issue. And I teach my students to be suspicious of screens that ask for too many permissions, with good reason! 2. Can I connect this to my institution's internal Github enterprise? I currently manage assignment distribution and collection with hand-rolled Github scripts that run against our institution's deployment. Do the teachers_pet scripts work in that environment as well, or is there Classroom-specific setup required to make that work? 3. On the screen where I choose organizations, there was a text box for a new organization, and a dropdown. I thought I was making the choice to create a new organization, but it seems to be creating all the repos in an existing organization selected in the dropdown. This has caused a lot of folks to all of a sudden get signed up for automatic notifications who are members of the selected org. That's annoying, now I have to clean up after Classroom and figure out what went wrong. I doubt that adding random student repos to an existing organization is ever what a new user wants, and I tried to follow the flow that (I thought) would not accidentally do that. It seems like a Classroom organization is a different thing from a Github organization?
- johndbritton 11y ago1. We're working with the OAuth permission model that exists today, but I've passed along your feedback to our platform team. The generic use case for Classroom for GitHub is to create a new organization to use for student assignments and use Classroom for GitHub to manage that organization. If / when you decide to stop using Classroom for GitHub you can remove your organization and it will clean up after itself. 2. GitHub Enterprise is not supported, but others have requested this feature: https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/240 https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/240 3. I'm having a hard time understanding your situation, but would appreciate it if you could file an issue at https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/new https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/new, can't promise that it will be fixed immediately, but need to gather feedback like this.
- kriro 11y agoLooks great at first glance I'll incorporate it into my new class eventually. I read through the education stuff and if I'm reading correctly one can get a free private repo for coursework? My class has two groups of 30 and they'll eventually have to complete a longer project in subgroups of 3-5. Any recommendations for that setup? I'm assuming there's no free plan for this as it would essentially require ~20 private repos. Those could get wiped every semester though. I've def. scribbled down that I want to teach git(hub) ASAP because learning to use it from the getgo in the first semester is huge.
- johndbritton 11y agoAs a teacher you can get as many private repositories as you need for your course for free. Just make a request here: https://education.github.com/discount https://education.github.com/discount
- gourneau 11y agoThis is interesting to me as a way to give software candidates quizzes. HackerRank similar services are comically expensive.
- johndbritton 11y agoWould love to hear more about your use case if it works for you. Definitely leave some feedback in an issue on the open source repository: https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/new https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/new
- clw8 11y agoWill this be available for Edx and Coursera too? So few CS MOOCs encourage version control and they certainly don't allow using a free public repo.