Abstract:

Github is a collaborative platform of choice in the IT industries and has recently become a popular teaching tool for programming courses. In 2020, it was chosen as an online distance learning tool for a Graphic Programming Language course during the COVID-19 crisis at the Undergraduate Professional Study of Informatics at Zagreb University of Applied Sciences. With support from GitHub Classroom and Microsoft Teams, its primary use was to deliver course material, manage students’ coursework, submit assignments, provide feedback, and communicate between teaching staff and students. Consequently, during the process of teaching standard course material, students were compelled to learn how to use this code management tool, which has become mandatory among developers for securing a job in the IT field. After the students returned to the real classroom halftime and fulltime a year later, previously created GitHub educational materials and teaching process were reused with modifications mainly concerning giving feedback. This paper aims to show the different learning outcomes between distance, hybrid and face-to-face education using the GitHub platform while presenting the process of creating a GitHub graphic programming course. This experience revealed that students acquired less skills and knowledge during the distance and hybrid educational process compared to the face-to-face version of the course.

Keywords:

GitHub, distance learning, educational tools, learning outcomes.