A Quick Look at Github Classroom and a Note on How Easy Github on the Web Is To Use…

With the OU VC announcing a future vision for the OU as a “university of the cloud” (quiet, at the back there…), I thought I’d have a look at Github Classroom, prompted by a post I was alerted to by @biztechpm on How to grade programming assignments on GitHub.

Getting started meant creating a Github organisation (I created innovationOUtside), logging in to Github Classroom (about), and requesting some private repositories (I asked for 25 and got unlimited) that could be used for setting Github mediated assignments as well as receiving student submissions back).

The Github Classroom model is based around Classrooms that contain Assignments, which can be specified as individual assignments or group assignments.

When students accept an invitation to an assignment (or at least, a private individual assignment, which is all I’ve gad a chance to look at so far), creates a repository viewable within the classroom on the group account. This repo is viewable by the student and the Classroom moderators.

If the assignment has been seeded with starter code, such as the statement of the assignment, or files associated with the assignment, will be used to see the student’s repository. (For convenience, I created a private repo on the group account to act as the repo for see files in a particular assignment.) If the seed files are updated, the student can update their own repository and then mark changes against that, but this needs to be done under git in a synched repo on the command line:-(

git remote add upstream https://github.com/innovationOUtside/ASSIGNMENT_BASE_REPO.git

git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master

git can be a bit of a pain to work with on the command line and the desktop client, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. If the seed files arenlt updated once student repos are created, the student can operate completely via the Github website. For example, to add or update files contained within a particular directory in the repository, users can simply drag a file from their desktop and drop it onto the appropriate repo and directory listing webpage.

Additional files can then be uploaded and committed, along with corresponding commit messages:

Files  – and directories – can also be created and edited directly on the Github website. Simply Create a new file:

and then enter the file name required, along with a new subdirectory path if you want to place the file in a newly created subdirectory.

You can then edit the file (and if it’s markdown, preview a rendered version of it) in the browser.

Of course, working in the Github file editor means students can’t execute and test their code [update: though I guess they could by using continuous integration and test tools, such as Circle CI or Travis; CircleCI is free for public repos but probably not private ones?]; but it’s easy enough to just download a zip file of the files contained in a repo, work on those, and then drag the completed files back into the online repo to upload it and check it in.

If a student checks in their updated script and gives it an obvious commit message, a moderator with privileges over the classroom the student’s repository is associated with can click onto that check in and (If the student has made multiple checkins, it would be useful if they rebased against the upstream master. I’m not sure if this can be done in the web client?)

The moderator can then see what changes made to the original script as their submitted work and comment on a line by line basis on the student’s script.

Unfortunately, if checked in documents are Jupyter notebooks, the simple github differencer isn’t as helpful as it could be:

Given that Github added a notebook previewer for notebook .ipynb files, it’s possible that they may add in support for the nbdime notebook differ. However, in the meantime, it would be possible to download student repos (possibly using a tool like Gitomator? and then check them using nbdime. It may also be possible to create a moderator/marker extension to help with this? The problem then is getting annotated notebooks back to the student. In which respect, I’m not sure if a moderator can check a file back in to a student’s private assignment repository, although I suppose a group assignment could perhaps be used in this respect with two member groups: the student and the moderator.

One final thought in terms of OU workflow, assignments are marked by students’ tutors, which makes for a management issue when allocating moderator permissions. One solution here may be to create a classroom for each moderator and with duplicate assignments seeded from the same original repo then allocated into each classroom.

PS one way of testing student code may be to autograde it using CI tools; for example, this thread on Github Classroom versus nbgrader.

PPS diffing notebooks is made easier if you don’t commit ipynb files, but instead at least commit py or md adjunct to notebooks generated using something like Jupytext. See a review of my intial tinkering w/ Jupytext here: Exploring Jupytext – Creating Simple Python Modules Via a Notebook UI.