I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for both me and the students, so everybody gets a little more done.
By the way, your article has encouraged me to get the students using issues for eg. homework questions they'd normally email, thanks for that.
The process to get students fluid at the basic flow took a few days, but after a while it was great and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. Any programming course using this is obvious, but I'd even do it for non-programming things if I could get the student trained on it in a minimal amount of time.
The only roadblocks with git are that there's so many basic ways to screw up, which are hard to fix. Let's say a student does a `git init` in their `~/code` folder that holds all of their git projects... and then makes a bunch of commits, and then can't figure out why they can't push to github. I wish there were some better failsafes to prevent such things, but they happened by accident once a week at least.
In fact, the blog post doesn't include all the details, but some of the educators we interviewed were not from CS. You can see a table describing all the participants in our research paper (the link is provided at the end of the blog post).
Just like you, I believe it is completely possible to use this for non CS classes, and still gain all the benefits. However, like you said, there should be a basic understanding of Git.
Many of git's capabilities seem esoteric to students, and for someone just starting indeed they are (students aren't managing a huge FOSS project, just their homework).
Today, we released Classroom for GitHub: https://classroom.github.com
Classroom for GitHub automates repository creation and access control, making it easy for teachers to distribute starter code and collect assignments on GitHub.
You can read more about it on our blog: https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-wi...
