GitHub Classroom report predicts positive student learning outcomes

I would be very cautious in drawing any conclusions on the impact of GitHub use on student outcomes. This is a correlational study and correlation doesn’t imply causation. They dance around the issue by using “predict” in their report.

A possible (and plausible?) alternative story is that professor who are “better” require their students to use git and GitHub. As a result, the study is picking up the effects of “being better” instead of GitHub use.

I wonder if these results could be replicated with an experimental study.

Edit:

By the way, the results are pretty cool. I ran some factor analyses/structural models and I found that students in courses that use GitHub feel, on average, 0.36 standard deviations more prepared than students in classroom where GitHub was not used. You can see the analysis in my fork of the dataset on GitHub (same username as HN).

Basically what this is saying is that spending a lot of money, time and work in general, to organize campus/school/other events where young developers/aspiring developers attend for FREE to learn about git and other stuff... is turning out to be good and beneficial for those who attended?

Well, that's fantastic - plugging the holes of the education system is a very honorable thing. Congrats to GitHub for coming up with this marketing initiative that is somewhat altruistic and not just marketing, okay it's definitely a lot of marketing too!

I support all efforts to teach version control. I've had to teach +40 year old developers git, and got to skip it with interns. I feel like getting people productive is so much easier if they know how something like git works at the start.

I am a self taught developer who never went to college, is git normally not taught in school?

Is there a FLOSS alternative that is equally easy to setup and use for both teacher and students?