Classroom for GitHub(classroom.github.com) |
Classroom for GitHub(classroom.github.com) |
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?
2. GitHub Enterprise is not supported, but others have requested this feature: 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, can't promise that it will be fixed immediately, but need to gather feedback like this.
Issue for (3) reported here: https://github.com/education/classroom/issues/250
- user management is a bit of a pain. Students are always late getting their github usernames to me, often with typos, and there are three different dates during term when the class-list changes (last day to enrol, last day to withdraw without incurring a HECS fee, last day to withdraw without academic penalty). If you could do an LTI endpoint, that would be helpful, as most LMSs support LTI. At the moment, we're considering running GitLab instead, as that supposedly has LDAP and so can use our university server logins.
- using teachers-pet (GitHub's command-line tools) for assignments this term, I found an issue where a student made a public fork of their assignment repository. Unfortunately this is problematic, as it could cause students to (accidentally) run into trouble with university plagiarism policies (where putting your work up for others to plagiarise in an assignment is also outlawed).
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).
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).
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.
There's more info on our blog: https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-wi...
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.
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.
You can check it out here: https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new
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.]
Google Classroom is a much more powerful alternative to that.
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.
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.
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
https://help.github.com/articles/about-third-party-applicati...
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.
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_...
Immediately forwarded to favorite CS prof.
You no longer need to collect usernames, just distribute an invitation URL and have your students include their student number or name in the repository description or README.md.
Forking is intended as a collaboration tool, so it makes sense that every member of the network can see all forks in the network. In a classroom setting, however, this might not make sense. Classroom for GitHub doesn't utilize forking, instead it creates independent repositories and pushes the starter code without using forks.
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.
I cruise without Java and Flash so it must have been some sort of hacked together proprietary upload button which triggered a regular file dialog anyway (JavaScript was enabled, I think). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's any space to disrupt it's e-learning, but that's probably more of a deal-cutting job with major institutions than having an objectively better (looking) product.
Blackboard is truly terrible
It has caused some heated discussions at our university regarding student privacy.
I see a lot of positives in that system, but it feels like a way for companies to more easily ignore candidates who aren't from top schools. My concern would be further ostracizing qualified students who don't go to top schools.