Towards Flexible and Extensible Git-based Course Management with RepoBee

RepoBee is an open source tool that helps teachers to use Git effectively in teaching. Use of version control systems has been growing in popularity, with more teachers adopting the technology, or planning to in the future. However, systems like Git are challenging to use and were not designed with teaching in mind. In response, tools have emerged that attempt to reduce the complexity of this task for teachers, whilst providing students with an authentic experience of using a version control system. We have developed RepoBee to provide common features a teacher might need: the ability to distribute assignments to students; gather their efforts for grading; run grading tasks and other analytics; as well enabling support for peer review. In sharing our solution with other academics, it has become clear that there is a wide range of needs. This in turn has influenced our design philosophy for RepoBee such that it should be flexible and extensible, in order to be used in a broad range of teaching contexts and can be extended to accommodate course specific needs. This paper aims to draw attention to three particular aspects that distinguish RepoBee: support for different course models; support for course specific features; and support for multiple repository hosting platforms.
QC 20210915