EDUGIT: TOWARD A PLATFORM FOR PUBLISHING AND ADOPTING COURSE CONTENT IN ALL DISCIPLINES - EDUCHI 2019
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EduGit: Toward a Platform for
Publishing and Adopting Course
Content in All Disciplines
Michael C. Stewart Zamua O. Nasrawt
stewarmc@jmu.edu nasrawzo@dukes.jmu.edu
James Madison University James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
Jason Forsyth
forsy2jb@jmu.edu
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
ABSTRACT
In light of the continued dearth of an online Community of Practice for the collaborative development
and distribution of educational materials for Human Computer Interaction, we propose EduGit.
EduGit is a web application (under heavy development in the proof-of-concept phase) that serves as a
platform for publishing, adopting, and collaboratively authoring educational resources. The system
will facilitate and incentivize publishing and adoption of course materials through interactions with
existing learning management systems and estimate impact through aggregated material adoption
and usage statistics.
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EduCHI ’19, April 4, 2019, Glasgow, UK
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9999-9/18/06. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456EduGit: Toward a Platform for Publishing and Adopting Course Content in All Disciplines EduCHI ’19, April 4, 2019, Glasgow, UK
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; • Social and professional
topics → Model curricula.
KEYWORDS
education, sharing, online community, open educational resources, community of practice
ACM Reference Format:
Michael C. Stewart, Zamua O. Nasrawt, and Jason Forsyth. 2019. EduGit: Toward a Platform for Publishing and
Adopting Course Content in All Disciplines. In EduCHI ’19: Global Perspectives on HCI Education, April 4, 2019,
Glasgow, UK . ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456
INTRODUCTION
There has been a sustained interest in electronically sharing educational materials since there have
been electronic means to do so (e.g. [17]). Across various disciplines there have been periodic efforts
addressing the need to share resources.
In the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community alone, there have been numerous efforts
to define, share, and critique curricula and to build a community of practice for HCI Education
[5–7, 11, 20]. We observe that in the field of software development there seem to be successful
communities of practice engaged in sharing and reuse of software artifacts (e.g. [1]). Through (1)
tracking the provenance of the source code, (2) nudging developers toward open licenses, and (3)
facilitating the incorporation of improvements from third-parties into the original code bases, GitHub
has fostered a vibrant community of collaborative software development. Following our participation
in [20], we are developing EduGit [21] to support the sharing (publishing and adoption) of course
materials, with lessons gleaned from GitHub and past education resource sharing efforts (e.g. those
above as well as [3, 4, 8, 9, 18, 19].
EDUGIT
EduGit is first a catalogued repository of educational materials. Interested authors of educational
materials will be able to easily publish their materials to the catalog. Interested educators will be able
to easily adopt those published materials for use in their own course. However, EduGit is intended to
be more than a simple catalog of published educational materials.
EduGit aims to help educators establish a consequential practice of citing sources. The system will
track the adoptions of published materials to provide evidence of use. Similar to citation counts or the
“h-index” for estimating researcher impact, statistics about actual adoption of an author’s educational
materials by other educators can help establish their educational impact. HCI educators may haveEduGit: Toward a Platform for Publishing and Adopting Course Content in All Disciplines EduCHI ’19, April 4, 2019, Glasgow, UK
differential need for such measures depending on their professional role [14]. EduGit has two primary
Goals: (1) to facilitate: (a) the publication of educational resources and (b) the adoption of educational
resources; and (2)to incentivize: (a) the publication of educational resources and (b) collaboration on
educational resources.
In addition to the primary goals related to sharing educational resources, we are carefully designing
EduGit to create a space for specific people to have specific interactions [10] that we believe are not
well supported otherwise. We are designing EduGit to facilitate and incentivize critique of educational
resources and pedagogical approaches.
Features
In the first version of EduGit, educational resources will only be able to be shared in units of a course
(i.e. all content for a whole term of a course), and only those “Courses” available within a Canvas LMS
[12] course. Of course, this simplification is not without repercussions. We are essentially — at least
at this first phase — delegating to an educational technology development community the definition
of a “course” and what content it does and does not include.
User Experience
EduGit should be simple to use. Educators of any academic level and from any discipline should be
able to publish and adopt courses with ease. Despite the “git” [22] suffix, publishers and adopters of
content should have a simple graphical user interface in the EduGit web application for publishing
and adopting content. Given the simplifications in the first version (see: Features), the process of
publishing and adopting materials is simplified to publishing and adopting courses. This reduction in
scope results in a simpler user experience for both (1) the actions of publishing and adopting, and (2)
the pedagogical practice of comprehending and incorporating another educator’s resources. To be
clear, we will not be expecting users of EduGit to have any familiarity with the git source control and
versioning system [22].
Publishing. An educator wishing to publish their course to the EduGit catalog will simply click a
“Publish my course(s)” button, which will prompt them to sign in to their institution’s Canvas instance.
Having authenticated and granted EduGit access to their institutional Canvas account, the educator
will see a detailed presentation of all the courses they have taught, each with a “Publish” button.
Adding their course to the EduGit catalog simply requires clicking the corresponding “Publish” button.
Adopting. Similarly, an educator who finds a course they wish to adopt in the EduGit catalog can simply
click the course’s corresponding "Adopt" button. This will redirect the educator to their institution’s
Canvas authentication process. Having successfully authenticated and authorized EduGit to access
their Canvas account, EduGit will present the adopting educator with a detailed list of their courses.EduGit: Toward a Platform for Publishing and Adopting Course Content in All Disciplines EduCHI ’19, April 4, 2019, Glasgow, UK
Simply clicking one of these courses’ corresponding “Select” button will import the published Canvas
course contents into the adopter’s course.
Collaboration and Updates. EduGit requires access to educators’ existing institutional Canvas accounts
to function. This access enables EduGit to support the educators in tracking changes to courses they
have published or adopted.
When an educator makes a change to a course that has been adopted by others, the educator
can be prompted to indicate whether the changes might be beneficial (downstream) to the adopters.
Likewise when an adopter makes changes to a Canvas course that they have adopted from another
educator, EduGit can prompt the adopter to indicate whether it would be appropriate to propose the
change (upstream) to the course from which they adopted the content.
In choosing whether to share these updates up- or downstream, educators may wish to describe
the changes and perhaps their rationale. Like git’s commit messages, and GitHub’s pull requests,
these discussions of rationale for changes create a space for contextualized, detailed discussion of
pedagogical choices that currently lack a designated arena.
DISCUSSION
EduGit will contribute to rich discussions about the development of online communities of practice for
educational resources [13, 15, 16, 23]. In addition to questions of the establishment and maintenance
of the online community of practice, interesting questions of user experience and pedagogical practice
confront EduGit.
Currently, there is little meaningful citation of another educator’s materials. The lack of track-
ing/tabulation of citations to pedagogical content promotes less consistent attribution of authorship.
As EduGit aims to support attribution, there may be an issue in soliciting original content. That is,
having lacked a meaningful outcome of attributing educational resources to the original authors,
experienced educators may have a significant amount of unattributed content in “their” courses.
These educators may feel uncomfortable publishing “their” course materials as they recognize their
inability to properly cite their sources so long after they originally adopted them.
There is currently little professional space for developing and sharing quality educational materials.
While some conferences (e.g. SIGCSE [2]) do have Experience Reports, there remain too few opportu-
nities for educators to seek criticism of and collaboration on their educational materials. In EduGit,
we can provide the ability to attribute to the contributor the change a publisher incorporates into
their course. We expect this to help improve the (likelihood and) quality of the collaboration.
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