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Welcome to the virtual-classroom wiki!

virtual-classroom is a tool for using GitHub classrooms in university courses where students are to assess each others exercises. The idea is that every student has a private repository for all exercises in a course. Students are then divided into assessment groups, say of 3-5 students. Each group assesses a corresponding number of exercises done by other students or students in the group itself. Since the repos are private, it becomes necessary to give an assessment group temporary access to private repos. The assessment group then gives oral or written feedback on the exercises. In such a set-up, it becomes possible to assess a large number of exercises in a course without scaling up the number of teaching assistants. The virtual-classroom scripts automate this type of teaching such that there is little manual work for the lecturer or a teaching assistant.

Mutual assessment by students has obvious advantages and disadvantages:

1. Advantage: Students get experience with assessing other students' work.
2. Advantage: Students get more feedback on their work.
3. Disadvantage: The quality of the feedback is usually (much) lower compared with a qualified teacher.

It is important to find ways of communicating the feedback such that points 1 and 2 outweight point 3. Our experience goes as follows.

• Some ranking of the students is necessary such that each assessment group contains a strong student.
• Written feedback tends to be sparse and imprecise. Oral feedback to the student results in better assessment and more useful constructive criticism.
• It is easier to give informative feedback on mathematics than on computer code.

We have ended up with assessment groups which assess their own exercises: in a group of N students, N-1 students discuss the exercise of the remaining student who listens to the feedback and can ask questions. Teaching assistants should be available for consultation, either in cyberspace or physically in the classroom.

A definite great advantage with the set-up described above is that every student is forced to use the Git version control system for all work: computer programs, project reports, and data.

Read about how to use the virtual-classroom tool from start to end in the Workflow document.

Have a look at the examples directory for different ways to use virtual-classroom.