How Students Are Using GitHub? A Survey

Recently, computer science educators have started adopting GitHub in teaching software engineering (SE) and other programming-related courses to impart the teamwork and collaboration aspects to the students when working on team projects. The educators aim to leverage the technical and social features of GitHub to deliver the course material effectively and to promote students’ collaboration, and monitor student activity on team projects. A few works have highlighted the benefits of using GitHub in student projects. However, the students’ perspective of adopting GitHub and using it for the SE and related courses is widely missing. To shed more light on this, the presented work investigates the students’ viewpoints of using GitHub and its adoption in classroom courses and further reports the benefits and drawbacks. We surveyed a total of 315 students, including undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students of computer science stream. The research method includes a survey and a qualitative analysis of students’ behaviour in the course. The analysis and findings reported in this paper provide several valuable insights on how students perceive and utilize the GitHub tool. Inherently, GitHub is not an educational tool. However, the findings reported in this work can be used to improve software engineering and computer science education, and also be helpful for instructors on how to use GitHub more effectively in their courses.