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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

As a teacher and tech-enthusiast, I've used countless pieces of software designed to "aid" me in my teaching and administration.

I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

The trouble always seems to stem from a lack of understanding of what teachers actually go through in a given day, whether it be setting and assessing work for students, tracking and monitoring performance, or reporting back to students and parents.

It's telling that the most effective way I found of having students submit work to me and for me to provide feedback, targets and grades was using GitHub. This is a product that is used internally within the organisation that produces it, and so works (almost) seamlessly.

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For fun (and because ilearn sucks), I taught a computer science class where the students helped create a learning management system based on git. Each student's grades are stored in a repo that they own, and the instructors use signed commits to update the students' grades. I offered an extra credit bounty to anyone who could write arbitrary grades to their repo without getting caught, and had a few students discover some clever loopholes.

The documentation is super unpolished, but you can find the repos here: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn

The "how grades are stored" file in the docs is probably the most interesting: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/gra..., but there's also docs on how to start up and run a class using gitlearn.

Out of curiosity, how would the students actually go about making their grades private. Free github accounts don't actually get any private repo's, so aren't you effectively requiring a student who wants to maintain some secrecy to pay extra?

GitHub != Git. Git is free and open version control software, GitHub is a commercial hosting service and social network that uses Git. You can use Git without using GitHub.

GitHub are quite kind to educational institutions and will give you private repos for free. I got 50 just by asking in an email. If the student is a member of your organisation, then when they fork the repo it remains private.

1. Github provides free educational accounts to students.

2. The repos could be maintained on any git server, so bit bucket would work just fine.

3. Even if the students had to pay for github private repos, the price would be far less than even the cheapest textbooks.

>I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

That's because they weren't really designed for you the teacher, they are designed for administrators and required reporting to the government.

Teachers, sadly, are seen as mere data entry nodes for most of these systems.

What does that Github centered workflow look like for a given assignment?

1. My school organisation creates a repo for each kid's project.

2. Kid forks the repo then starts working on their project. Normally they add in their code, and use the README.md as the written part of their assignment.

3. When they are ready to submit their work, they put in a pull request.

4. I can view the README and code if it's their first submission, or just view the diffs if they're responding to feedback and improving their work.

5. Feedback can be provided using GitHub issues.

I would caution others to be careful about school policies before taking this approach. I teach in a university undergrad program and storing grades off campus is considered a violation of university regulations as well as FERPA. Putting projects on Github or Bitbucket is fine ( I do this as well ) - its the posting of grades that is problematic.

The University of St. Andrews has a homebrew administration/submission/marking system https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/mms-guides/ that works pretty well by now, after a lot of close-range user feedback. (Disclosure: I know the guy who wrote it https://jrn.me.uk//about/ )

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