Rethinking Git Teaching – A Novel Pedagogical Approach

We are excited to share our recently published article, Rethinking How We Teach Git, which introduces a pedagogically grounded and practically tested framework for teaching Git in information systems education. This work was developed collaboratively at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg as part of our broader efforts to equip students with essential tools for digital collaboration, open-source contribution, and reproducible research.

🎥 Watch the overview video:

Key Findings:

  • New teaching sequence: We challenge conventional Git pedagogy by starting with branching—the backbone of Git’s model—before moving to committing and collaboration. This reordering, based on cognitive and pedagogical theory, improves understanding and student confidence.
  • Cognitive and practical scaffolding: By disentangling technical setup and isolating competence areas (branching, committing, collaborating), the approach allows students to progress through conceptually self-contained modules before tackling integration and transfer tasks.
  • Gamified and open-source learning: Students practiced Git in realistic, hands-on environments such as the Open-Source Collaboration Game, reinforcing social learning and skill transfer in open project contexts.

Implications:

Git is no longer a niche skill—it underpins workflows in software development, research methods, academic handbooks, and collaborative writing. In our curriculum, Git training is an essential pillar:

  • In the Introduction to Digital Work, students engage with Git for organizing and managing Markdown-based content, learning its role in structuring and maintaining digital documents collaboratively.
  • In The Open-Source Project, Git is used extensively in Python package development, open-source contribution, and collaborative tool-building, including testing, documentation, and issue tracking workflows.

We expect Git to become increasingly relevant for qualitative research and literature review workflows, where structured versioning, transparency, and reproducibility are essential:

  • We develop the CoLRev platform as a Git-based, open-synthesis environment for collaborative and reproducible literature reviews, enabling versioned evidence bases, traceable inclusion decisions, and automation-supported synthesis.
  • Our Digital Work Lab Handbook is itself developed as a Git-based participatory initiative, demonstrating how academic teams can co-create, maintain, and evolve living documentation for research, teaching, and collaboration.

These examples illustrate how Git is transforming not only code-based work, but also broader practices of digital scholarship, pedagogy, and academic knowledge production.

📖 Read the full article: Journal of Information Systems Education, 2025

Citation:

Wagner, G., Thurner, C., & et al. (2025). Rethinking Git Teaching: A Novel Pedagogical Framework for Information Systems Education. Journal of Information Systems Education, 36(1), 1-12. Read the full article