Using GitHub in the Classroom - a Collaborative Learning Experience

Abstract

The most important skills employers are looking for in engineering are creativity, ability to work in teams and critical thinking. However the most used teaching methods at universities, based on individual assignments or group projects while do address the creativity, fall back on the critical thinking and even in team work skill. Collaborative learning was long suggested as a good alternative for enhancing these skills and recent evolution in social coding sites and collaborative software development give a new opportunity to employ such teaching method. This paper presents the results of a collaborative learning experiment carried out by using GitHub in laboratory assignments, where the main focus was on the direct interaction of the students on each other’s learning process. Results were analyzed in comparison with traditional methods and also perspectives of enhancing the learning experience in the vision of current workforce requirements.