Coding

GitHub Classroom Adds Multi-Class Support

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/06/19

An online open source program originally designed to help software developers collaborate but then modified to help instructors manage computer science-oriented workflows in their courses has added a function intended to simplify its use across the college or university.

GitHub Classroom offers a way for faculty to stay organized by providing a place to make assignments, collect them and allow students to continue making revisions, which generates alerts that go back to the instructor. Classroom works alongside learning management systems; feedback can be collected in GitHub and grades maintained in the LMS, for example.

Now the application has been updated to let the instructor use a single organization for all classes. This feature enables them to organize course materials for multiple classes, across the department or for the entire school.

As instructions on the GitHub site explained, to use the new feature, the teacher logs into Classroom, chooses "New classroom," selects a GitHub organization for the classroom, enters a name and clicks Continue.

Currently, the organization reported, some 20,000 people around the world are using the Classroom version of the software. Recently, the first cohort of "Campus Advisors" was congratulated. These individuals finished 10 hours of self-paced training on Git, GitHub and the school-specific tools. The training is available free to instructors working in a school that uses GitHub Education.