Previously I have written about using GitHub for my classes. I have been doing this for a number of years but GitHub has changed over the many years that I have been using this, so I thought, that I should do an update about my current workflow.
Classroom vs Education
GitHub education (education.github.com) is the community for educators using GitHub. Its what you use to get your discount. Its where the education community forums (education.github.community) are located.
GitHub classroom (classroom.github.com) is an application to help you manage repositories for your students. It has been improved over the years and in all honesty I do not use its full feature set. But even that little bit that I do use makes my workflow simpler so I’ll share it with you.
Background
I began using GitHub for teaching many years ago. It was before the classroom.github.com app existed. When I first started, I used google forms to gather GitHub ids and then created repos for my students. Initially I did this manually and later I wrote some bash scripts to help me do this.
In the past 2 years or so however, I have moved from that process to using github classroom. It is a pretty awesome application that has made my life a lot easier.
To use github classroom
To use GitHub classroom, you will need to do the following:
- create a free GitHub account using your school credentials (your official email helps you get verified a lot faster)
- apply for a teacher discount here (its been slower since pandemic started so you want to get this done sooner rather than later)
- after you get approved for the discount, create a free GitHub organization
- upgrade your free organization to a team plan
The GitHub pricing plans have changed a lot throughout the years. When I first started, you paid for privacy. After that it was pay for collaborators. And now.. you sort of pay for advance features.. You may be able to get away with not upgrading to use GitHub classroom if you are ok with basic feature set (Note, I have not ever tested this.. so I am not sure that it is true.. you may need to do upgrade to use GitHub classroom properly). You can check out the pricing plans here. Some of the features that I like aren’t available for free. The ones I like are: advanced tools and insights on private repos, gh pages, wikis, etc (see GitHub pro features). So if you want those in the private repos for your students, then do the upgrade request.
In any case, bottom line, you need to set up an organization to use GitHub classroom
How many?
One of the first things you will want to decide is how to structure your organization(s) and repositories. Here are some thing to think about in your decision:
Do you do one organization for all your courses or one for each course?
Do you want to create a new organization each year or keep the same organization?
Do you do one repository per student or one repository for assignment?
If there are multiple instructors should every instructor have their own organization or just one organization for everyone?
These decisions will depend on your use case as well as the number of students, number of assignments, number of teachers, familiarity of teacher with GitHub classroom etc. Other considerations include how teachers may interact with the content of their students.. will they go to the organization or they be looking at their students work only through the classroom app? These will also determine how many orgs and repos you need.
For me, my class sizes are around 40 students per section. Some courses I have 1 section, some courses I have two sections. Each course I teach typically has 3 assignments and 8 or 9 labs. Given these numbers, what I usually do is this:
- Each semester, I create an organization for each course I teach. This allows me to separate the content and more easily distinguish between my organizations. So one org per course per semester. If I have two sections of the same course, I still only create one organization
- My labs are completely individual while my assignments can be done in pairs. I also allow my students to switch partners for each assignment. Because of this, my students all have one repository for their labs (all labs go to same repository) as well as a repository for each of their 3 assignments.
- Typically what this means is that there are around 100 to 160 repos per organization (depends on how many work in pairs). This isn’t too bad to manage and there are some tricks that I use to find things quickly.
Classroom to create a private class repo
I like to host each course I teach in a GitHub repository. Every example I code can be hosted as source files that students can clone and play with. If they just want to look at the source code, its available online with proper syntax highlighting.
Sometimes you want a place to host your course materials without sharing it to general public. There are all kinds of ways to do this but you can actually grant access via GitHub.The way you do this is you start by creating a group assignment on GitHub that allows a maximum of 1 team. Then go to the assignment acceptance link and accept the assignment. Manually make the repository read access for the one team that has access (you will always have access as organization owner)
After you have done this, provide the acceptance link to your students and have them “join” that only team. This will create one big team for every student in class and they will have access to a private repository where your materials can go. Something to consider though.. one of my students went home to be with their parents in Iran during the pandemic… and lost access to all private repositories… Things you never consider pre-pandemic but something to keep in mind if your students are all over the world. I ended up opening up the repo to ensure they have access. In any case, once we resume live classes I will probably go back to this methodology as I thought it was quite nice.
Classroom as a mass repo creation app
The GitHub classroom app was built for teachers so it tries to put GitHub resources in terms of how teachers might view the world. Thus, the classroom app, doesn’t refer to the creation of repositories/organizations often (it does a little bit.. but its more of a means to an ends as opposed to a goal). Instead it uses the term assignments and classrooms.
When you go to classroom.github.com, the first thing it will ask you to do is setup a classroom. The way I always think about this is that for each course you teach each semester, you need at least one classroom. If you teach with multiple instructors in the same course, it may be advantageous to set up separate classrooms for each teacher. For me I find that it is just a lot of extra work so instead I use one classroom per course even when team teaching
Given how I set up my organizations, it means I typically have one classroom associated with one organization. you can however have multiple classrooms per organization if you want.
After setting up a classroom, you will be able to create an “assignment” for the classroom. As someone who came to using GitHub after using it for coding projects, the easiest way to think about the assignment is that it is effectively a tool for repository creation and access. Your assignments can be individual or group based. For reasons I’ll explain later.. I generally create group assignments, even when its individual assignments.
When you create an assignment, you will have to fill out a form. This includes things like assignment name, number of people per team, maximum number of teams, starter template repo, autograding etc.
For me I have not yet explored their autograding feature. I know it uses github actions.. but haven’t had time to really explore this yet.. summer project. So I will skip on this for now.
For my individually done labs, I create a group assignment that only allows one team member called labs. The assignment initializes the repository from a template repo I have that contains all the starter and tester files the students need for their labs. The classroom app provides a link that my stduents can then use to “accept” their assignments. I give my students instructions that basically say that they need to use their given names (the ones that I can find in the LMS) for their team names. The reason I do group assignments instead of individual assignments for this is because the repository names created for group assignment is assignmentname-teamname. since the team name is their actual names, I’ll be able to find the student in the organization by simply doing a filter in the organization.
I generally read my students assignments (code) in the browser and rarely ever download it to my computer. For testing, I use our schools submitter application, so just reading it online is fine. However, a desktop application for GitHub classroom is also available. Using this application, you can download all the accepted assignments. In otherwords it will download every repository associated with a given assignment for all students. This is pretty nice if you want a local copy. One thing to note is that when I used git-LFS (git large file system), the assignments I got from the desktop app had corrupted files. only about 50% of the files opened properly. If I cloned the repo though, the files were just fine. I am not sure why though and I haven’t really looked into it.
For each assignment, I set up a group assignment that allows up to two students and provide instructions for students to use both teammember names as well as assignment number in their repository creation. The assignment number is necessary because when a group assignment is created, it creates a team in the GitHub repo. Since students can change teams for different assignments, I needed them to be able create a new team.. but not all do. many keep the same team so to avoid duplicate team names, I have them add an extra number.
Feedback through GitHub
Since I teach programming, GitHub has amazing tools for code discussion… this has been fantastic because our LMS (the Evil LMS that shall not be named…) has barely any ability to provide relevant feedback when it didn’t erase the feedback completely… because you didn’t hit save TWICE (yes twice.. if you only hit save once, you clearly didn’t want it saved badly enough 3 paragraphs of writing.. no you didn’t want it.. if you wanted it you would have hit both save buttons that were on two different pages…No confirmation needed to delete what you wrote … but if you want to make sure you save, you better confirm that save)…. but I digress.
Usually what I do is I look through my student’s code and provide feedback using the issue tracker. It lets me do things like provide perma links into the code.. for example.. here is a link to a code blurb for my animations:
you can actually highlight which lines of code need attention, and exactly what you want them to pay attention to using GitHub tools. Its pretty fantastic.
On GitHub I provide only feedback. No grades are ever posted there.. the number that goes into the grade is entered into the LMS based on the feedback. When its a group assignment, I only have to post my feedback once to the repo and enter their grades individually (just a number). I really like this process because I can provide details that just doesn’t make sense with the LMS. Students use to ask “I don’t understand what this comment means” a lot when I wrote it in the LMS because the feedback had no relationship with the assignment. On GitHub, comments can refer to very specific issues… that’s huge.
Conclusion
If you use GitHub for your classes but want a more automated workflow, consider checking out classroom. Its actually quite a nice tool for all sorts of purposes.
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