From: Neelam Soundarajan To: CC: , Subject: GitHub in the classroom Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 18:12:35 -0500 Colleagues, A couple of months ago, there was a discussion among members of the Undergrad Studies Committee about students using (and possibly misusing) GitHub for their projects and other classwork. The discussion was triggered by the use by a student, in a section of one of the junior project courses, of a public repository on GitHub to work on and complete an open-ended project in the course. Some of the UGSC members felt that this was an invitation to academic misconduct, especially because the project was saved under the course number (CSE 3901). At the same time, as some students argued, especially, given that this was an open-ended project, GitHub is *the* premier site for open source (and other) projects and our students should become comfortable with using it for their work. In order to see if there was a way to enable students to use GitHub while eliminating (or reducing) concerns related to academic misconduct, we have been in touch with GitHub. It turns out GitHub has a very proactive educational program and Aidan Feldman, one of the people from that program, and Jason Long a CSE-OSU alum and also works for GitHub, visited us recently. They met with a group of students and faculty (and also ran a GitHub workshop at the OSU Technology Commercialization Office). Aidan and Jason explained that GitHub has a very generous policy for working with faculty in universities. In particular, they are willing to provide, essentially for free, needed GitHub resources -- private and public repositories for individual students and teams; the admin rights to the repositories will belong to the instructor so that he or she can ensure that the students and student teams are able to work on their assignments and projects and share their work with others (including the grader, etc.), as determined by the instructor. After the semester ends, the repositories will not disappear; they will last indefinitely so that students will have continued access to what they did. And if the instructor teaches the same course in a later semester, he/she can request a fresh set of repositories, etc. In other words, GitHub is willing to provide the resources needed to make it usable in our classes, with instructors having full control over access to the projects on GitHub. Aidan also sent a set of GitHub links that provide information about the system. It is also worth noting that the policies described in GitHub's web pages may seem less generous than detailed above; but Aidan assured us that, in fact, any of our instructors who wants the students in their sections to use GitHub will have all the needed resources. The links that Aidan provided are included below. The GitHub people devoted to their education program are also very willing to answer questions from faculty (e-mail: education@github.com). So, bottom line: it looks like GitHub is available for use freely in any of our courses. So if you would like to try it in your class(es), please consult the GitHub guide at the link below; it links to the discount requst form you will have to complete. If you have any questions, please let Rajiv and me know; and we will try to answer them (or we may direct you to Aidan and his colleagues). Best wishes, --Neelam =============== GitHub resources: Guide for teachers to set up GitHub for classrooms https://education.github.com/guide A bunch of resources to learn Git/Github https://help.github.com/articles/what-are-other-good-resources-for-learning-git-and-github Our official open source training materials, which teachers could use to introduce Git/GitHub in classes http://training.github.com/materials/