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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Git is distributed but GitHub is not. Teaching Git would not be a bad idea, but quite frankly, I find the reliance on third-party services for courses (with apparently no provision to opt-out?) a bit of a disturbing trend. It doesn't matter if it's GitHub, SourceForge, CodePlex, Bitbucker, Google Code, or whatever else. Universities can and should host their own repositories, to remain impartial and responsible.

One goal was to have students graduate, so to speak, from the class actually having a GitHub account.

IMHO this is not entirely dissimilar to e.g. requiring Facebook for distributing course material, to which there are plenty of opponents. You should not need a Facebook account to learn. You should not need a GitHub account to practice computer science.

(Full disclosure: I do not have a GitHub account, nor do I intend to ever have one. I have taught some introductory CS.)

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My University provides a self-hosted GitLab (via the joint datacenter of the cities universities and research organisations) and it's really, really nice.

I think you can't really ask your students to sign up to anything or use anything that isn't hosted or provided by the university. And even for stuff provided by the university, you shouldn't be forced to use any particular software. As a mechanical engineer, I had to take CS intro class and they made us use Visual Studio. I never liked that class.

I see your point and I agree but I don't think it's a big deal. Your future employee will likely do the same.

I'm actually not so opposed about software like VS (at least the older versions which did not phone home, and which all you did was download and install) --- it's reliance on services that are the main concern.

> Full disclosure: I do not have a GitHub account, nor do I intend to ever have one. I have taught some introductory CS.

It seems like a curious decision to never intend to have a github profile. I'm interested to hear your perspective for that.

Harvard SEAS maintains an internally hosted git-based code repository so that is a non-GitHub option. GitHub is increasingly important for job seekers to present a portfolio, which is why it is useful for students, besides being a commonly used commercial tool.

Lots of people still disagree with the github-resume thing though. It seems that it's only valued in recent domains (ES5 web front end maybe).

How is it worse than subscribing to Blackboard or some other educational software service?

This goes beyond teaching for bsc, msc and phd students.

Scholar.google.com is becoming the central hub of science. My university is using Github for several CS classes. We have one course where you need to fix problems in a Github-based repo in order to pass the course. The entire course is also on Github: https://avandeursen.com/2013/12/30/teaching-software-archite... This goes beyond CS50, fix other peoples code, understand what 100k lines of code means.

Science is also moving to Github.

I run an open lab. All my weekly meeting notes and intermediate research results are public. All phd, msc, and bsc students in the lab report through Github. Amazing tool to keep track of progress. Sadly it's one organisation in control, no backups of issues. https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-...

Isn't Blackboard universally considered to be awful by everyone who is forced to use it?

...I was a student too long ago, but this is my impression from speaking with younger relatives.

Yes, it's terrible. The competitors aren't much better, if not worse.

If you think that's crazy, my friend's professor has the students join a Slack room he created that allows for anonymous usernames to discuss classroom stuff. He has the chat open in a projector during class. It's an interesting mess.

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