Turning in GitHub commits as assignments

[SethBattis]

Our compsci teacher has been an active member of our Canvas pilot. He's pretty interested in thinking about how he can have his students store their programming work in git repositories, and then turn in commits as assignments to Canvas.

Is there a tool that anyone is using that already does this? I know there's an LTI for GitHub Classroom, but that just syncs roster information from Canvas to GitHub -- nothing the other direction.

This is actually something that I gave a bunch of thought to a while back, but what I came up with was a bit idiosyncratic. It could be adapted, probably without _too_ much hassle, but I'd rather not roll my own solution if there's one already out there!

[paul_fynn]

So there's a couple of bits of experience I can share that might be of use.

1) When students are using Github for summative work we insist that they create an account based on their institutional email and ID, and we have some pretty tough spats over this, but we see it as important.

2) A former colleague set up a Github process whereby the students were tasked to work through a series of tasks in their own Github instance based on his application and content. Because we require submitted work to be on Canvas, his application then spat out the evidence of the students work, personalised to their identity, for upload into Canvas. Unfortunately he's gone back to industry and the approach with him.

[SethBattis]

@paul_fynn 100% yes on #1. We're actually setting up GitHub enterprise to facilitate SSO this summer.

#2… that tracks, of course. Sadly. The trick (and I worked out the logic for this on my tool) was to identify which files are relevant based on a commit that may not actually include updates to all files. I'll hang out for a bit in case others have suggestions. Our CS teacher's pragmatic solution is to just have them turn in the URL of their commit on GitHub. But I can _feel_ the quality-of-life improvement for everyone if it just chunked the relevant files into SpeedGrader-able PDFs or somesuch.