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Comment by reptation | Hacker News Reader

As a teacher of non-CS courses, it's nearly drool-worthy as an alternative to Blackboard but the private Repo's are not free and this is a deal breaker.

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GitHub Education provides free private repositories for educators.

You can check it out here: https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new

As I recall, that's only for use in the classroom, to get students hooked. If you're doing research, or anything other than teaching a class, you pay for private repos. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Bitbucket gives you a free unlimited account if you sign up with a .edu email address.

[Edit: You actually get five free repos. Still limited and not at all the deal you get with Bitbucket.]

No, GitHub gives you 5 free private repositories for any educational use if you sign up with an academic email. I use mine for research.

Researchers are eligible too.

I don't think this does anywhere near half the things Blackboard does.

Google Classroom is a much more powerful alternative to that.

Blackboard is an actual piece of shit, though. It's slow, still has trouble with most browsers, and doesn't get any of its features right. The four years of crap I had to put up with for that site are still fresh in my mind.

To be a bit more solution-oriented, most students and teachers don't care about the majority of what BB offers. They want:

* Upload and administer documents

* Assign grades to assignments

* Access Control to the above

* Speed across all browsers for the above

If Github can get these right, I don't see why they couldn't have a strong offering.

Blackboard is the perfect example of buying by checkboxes: it ticks the most boxes, but since the person who buys the software rarely has to use it (if it all), they don't care that it does all those things terribly.

It would be nice if respecting student privacy was one of the main requirements of a system like this.

Serious question: what aspects of student privacy can't be covered by "Access Control" mentioned above?

I could see a company doing something shady like collecting metrics on students across different types of classes to eventually sell to someone. I can't for the life of me understand why that kind of data would be valuable, but I'm sure someone could make use of student metrics for advertising purposes.

Companies might want to look at data, but so long as they aren't bribing teachers into sharing data from private repos, what can they do?

A company that creates discussions boards for courses is already doing that. They are called Piazza (https://piazza.com/) and used the student data they have been collecting to Piazza Careers: https://recruiting.piazza.com/

It has caused some heated discussions at our university regarding student privacy.

Yep, I used Piazza extensively in school. As a tool, it was actually pretty good and students used it heavily. Unfortunately when they shifted their focus to selling students to top companies it soured the taste in my mouth a bit.

I see a lot of positives in that system, but it feels like a way for companies to more easily ignore candidates who aren't from top schools. My concern would be further ostracizing qualified students who don't go to top schools.

Blackboard is so shit that sometimes you look at it and out loudly say "what the fuck is this shit and who thought it was a good idea?". I remember trying to upload a document, dragging the file to the upload button and the file opening in the browser. Whereas if they used the standard _HTML4_ file input type, you can drag files on top of them to select them without browsing to its location.

I cruise without Java and Flash so it must have been some sort of hacked together proprietary upload button which triggered a regular file dialog anyway (JavaScript was enabled, I think). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's any space to disrupt it's e-learning, but that's probably more of a deal-cutting job with major institutions than having an objectively better (looking) product.

I run into that first problem literally all over the web. It is the crux of me.

Blackboard is truly terrible

Our GitLab.com has free private repo's. Many universities use GitLab Community Edition so that students don't have to use a third party server.

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