In this post I will describe the system we use for delivering courses via GitHub in the UBC MDS program. I will first describe our high level goals and how we tackled them, and then discuss some implementation details. This post assumes the reader is familiar with git and GitHub and focuses more on the technical setup than the pedagogical implications.
Our main goals for this project were as follows:
- help students gain experience with version control systems
- eliminate all paper submissions
- facilitate peer review amongst the students
- facilitate group projects/assignments
- allow course staff to view and comment on work-in-progress remotely
- have a single place where most/all course content lives
When we were starting to think this through (around May 2016) there were already several existing solutions, such as GitHub Classroom, but none met all of our needs. We were committed to using GitHub rather than GitLab/Stash/etc because one of our team members, Jenny Bryan, had already been using GitHub to deliver STAT 545 and we wanted to build on her experience. The general approach is that students submit their work via GitHub and the TAs view/grade it there as well.
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