Fork U! Using GitHub to Collaborate and Share Course Content
In 2013 I had the opportunity to teach a new class for Marquette’s Honors Program — Lights, Camera, Activism. I developed this class through a combination of recollecting my favorite documentary and film making materials and brainstorming with colleagues engaging activities and assignments.
Recalling the amount of work it took to develop the course, after teaching and tweaking it over four offerings, I wanted to share the materials so others designing a similar course would not have to start from scratch; but in a way that would make it easy to copy the course content and allow others to add their own tweaks or suggestions to the existing material.
Posting a PDF or HTML files to a WordPress site would make the content easy to access but would not facilitate sharing with others who wanted to modify the content. Even if each page had a Creative Commons license at the bottom, modifying the content would require copying, pasting, and editing the material locally.
Having prior experience with GitHub, my solution was posting the course content in a GitHub repository.
Originally developed as a way to share and merge software code, any types of file can be part of a GitHub repository including plain text, MarkDown and HTML just to name a few. By posting on GitHub one can take advantage of the version tracking and “merging” features allowing you to quickly see differences between previous versions of files.
The version tracking of GitHub provides a more robust way to track changes, especially over multiple documents than the version tracking capabilities of Google Docs or Office 365. With GitHub you make commits of the current state of the document along with a little message explaining the changes.
These commits together create checkpoints of changes throughout the history of the document allowing one to easily revert back to a particular point in time if needed.
GitHub is also a social network, providing an easy way to discuss issues in a project and foster inter-institutional collaboration. Forking a repository will give another GitHub user a copy of the repository that they can edit on your own.
GitHub does take a bit of getting used to, however there are tutorials targeted to academics to get you up and forking in no time.
A course repository can be especially helpful for foundational courses where numerous instructors work from a standard template and course outline. Using a repository for these courses allow instructors to easily copy the master content but also provide them the ability to add their own assignments, resources and other ideas to the master template for others in the program to borrow or build on.
Searching “syllabus” in GitHub brings up a plethora of examples of how course content has been shared and may provide ideas on how you to can leverage the platforms capabilities to share your own course material.
Do you share your course content? If so, what platform(s) do you use? Has anybody else shared — or forked someone else’s — syllabus on GitHub? What pros/cons do you see for using GitHub as a course content repository?
