To obtain views on the usefulness of GitHub, a platform normally used for managing software development, 19 students from two software engineering courses were interviewed. While students made normal use of GitHub for their project work, the instructor used GitHub as a learning platform. Course content was made available using GitHub and each laboratory exercise had its own GitHub issues page. Interview materials were analyzed using the grounded theory approach.

GitHub was found to offer certain pedagogical benefits, for example, support for collaboration. Some groups utilized code written by other groups, which helped them discover and fix issues. One student used the pull request feature of GitHub to propose changes to course content. Another student succeeded in involving the wider community in his project work. Several students, however, were critical of using GitHub as a learning platform because it had no grade book feature and no formal submission feature.

A survey of students in the two courses is compromised by the nature of the questions posed. For example, why ask about the difficulty of learning to use GitHub when 14 of the 19 students interviewed claimed to have had previous experience with GitHub?

The investigators’ enthusiasm for GitHub as a learning platform does not seem justified. Most instructors would be best to capitalize on use of a modern learning management system such as Blackboard or Moodle supplemented with use of GitHub to manage software development when appropriate. This paper will be of interest only to computer science instructors.