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The software development community has embraced GitHub as an essential platform for managing their software projects. GitHub has created efficiencies and helped improve the way software professionals work. It not only provides a traceable project repository, but it acts as a social meeting place for interested parties, supporting communities of practice. Recently, educators have seen the potential in GitHub's collaborative features for managing and improving---perhaps even transforming---the learning experience. In this study, we examine how GitHub is emerging as a collaborative platform for education. We aim to understand how environments such as GitHub---environments that provide social and collaborative features in conjunction with distributed version control---may improve (or possibly hinder) the educational experience for students and teachers. We conduct a qualitative study focusing on how GitHub is being used in education, and the motivations, benefits and challenges it brings.
Zagalsky et al. (Tue,) studied this question.