Student Experiences Using GitHub in Software Engineering Courses: A Case Study

GitHub has been embraced by the software development community as an important social platform for managing software projects and to support collaborative development. More recently, educators have begun to adopt it for hosting course content and student assignments. From our previous research, we found that educators leverage GitHub’s collaboration and transparency features to create, reuse and remix course materials, and to encourage student contributions and monitor student activity on assignments and projects. However, our previous research did not consider the student perspective. In this paper, we present a case study where GitHub is used as a learning platform for two software engineering courses. We gathered student perspectives on how the use of GitHub in their courses might benefit them and to identify the challenges they may face. The findings from our case study indicate that software engineering students do benefit from GitHub’s transparent and open workflow. However, students were concerned that since GitHub is not inherently an educational tool, it lacks key features important for education and poses learning and privacy concerns. Our findings provide recommendations for designers on how tools such as GitHub can be used to improve software engineering education, and also point to recommendations for instructors on how to use it more effectively in their courses.