📣 Important announcement for Educators: GitHub Classroom functionality will be transitioning to partners · community · Discussion #196615

What is GitHub Classroom?

GitHub Classroom is a free tool designed to help educators using GitHub distribute coding assignments, provide automated feedback, and manage coursework using GitHub repositories.

What is changing and why?

For many educators using GitHub Classroom, you may know that this product has been operating under ‘maintenance mode’ for the past 18 months. We know this has been frustrating, and we want to make sure Classroom gets the investment it deserves.

That’s why we are announcing a transition plan from GitHub Classroom to partner solutions that can more reliably fulfill your needs.

Recommended classroom solutions

We've partnered with two fantastic organizations that offer the core Classroom workflows (assignment distribution, auto grading, and GitHub repo integration) plus capabilities we weren't able to build.

• Codio is a hands-on learning platform that combines interactive courseware, browser-based coding environments, and auto grading in one place. Instructors get free access - no cost to create curriculum, use the migration tool, or explore the full platform. Higher education institutions that sign an institution-pay agreement with Codio can receive 50 free standard Codio learner licenses for an initial 12-month period.  For detailed pricing, please contact the Codio team. Some features of this solution include:
  • LMS integration for single sign-on and grade passback
  • Ability to scale from a single course to department-wide adoption
  • Cheating prevention and plagiarism detection
  • A dedicated support team and SLA guarantees
  • To learn more about migrating from GitHub Classroom to Codio, see https://www.codio.com/github-classroom

• Classroom 50 is a free, open-source GitHub Classroom alternative developed by the Fifty Foundation, GitHub’s official open-source partner for educational software tools. Classroom 50 builds on the core Harvard CS50 classroom experience and includes both a command-line interface and a web interface that enables teachers to distribute programming assignments in repositories, configure auto-grading via GitHub Actions, and review student submissions. Classroom 50 is now live. Fifty Foundation will be hosting online training sessions in July and August. Learn more and register at Classroom 50.

Data Privacy and Compliance

GitHub takes the privacy of your data and your students' data seriously. As part of the GitHub Classroom deprecation:

• GitHub will not transfer your data to any third-party platform without your direction. Any classroom information you choose to migrate to another platform is entirely at your discretion.
• Your data will remain accessible and protected through August 28, 2026. After that date, some GitHub Classroom data – including classroom/assignments names, tests defined outside of repos, historical data around test runs, submissions, LTI integrated rosters - will be permanently deleted in accordance with GitHub's retention policies (final data deleted September 4, 2026).
• Before August 28, 2026, you can export your classroom data to local files using this Classroom Export Utility

To learn more about GitHub’s privacy practices, see our Privacy Statement

When will these changes happen?

Starting today, GitHub Classroom will no longer accept new users, so educators who are new to the platform will not be able to create a classroom.

However, educators who already have existing GitHub Classroom accounts and classrooms will be able to operate as normal (create classrooms, invite students, etc.)

On Friday August 28th GitHub Classroom will fully transition to partner solutions, no users will be able to sign in and manage classrooms on the platform, and the GitHub Classroom website will be decommissioned. However, all GitHub user accounts, repositories and organizations will remain unaffected.

We know this timeline is tight, especially for educators preparing fall coursework over the summer. The GitHub Education, Codio, and Fifty Foundation teams are committed to support you through this transition. Please take advantage of the support resources listed in the following section.

Support and Resources

• GitHub Education Support – for any specific questions about your GitHub Classroom account
• GitHub Educator Discussions – use this discussion thread to ask questions or share thoughts with the GitHub Education team and your fellow educators
• Codio Book a Consult – get a free, personalized consultation with a Codio representative tailored for your use case
• Codio Migration Instructions – step-by-step guide and video walkthrough
• Using GitHub with Codio – on-demand webinar
• Classroom 50 Teacher Guide – end-to-end walkthrough for instructors
• Classroom 50 Discussions – post a question or suggestion for the Fifty Foundation Team

Additional migration guidance and documentation will be coming over the summer and will be posted to this community discussion.

Looking Ahead

We know that change is not easy and many of you have been relying on GitHub Classroom for years, but we truly believe that these partner solutions are better, more sustainable long-term solutions for your teaching needs.

We're committed to making this transition as smooth as possible. The teams at GitHub Education, Codio, and Fifty Foundation are here to help.

GitHub will be hosting a virtual Educator Summit on June 10-12th that will include sessions to support your GitHub Classroom transition. Learn more and register at https://luma.com/law93emw.

Thank you for supporting students as they learn and build with GitHub.

The GitHub Education Team

Not surprised, but extremely disappointed in the lack of communication leading up to this.

The main reason we've had for using GitHub classroom is that our yearlong course requires students to use GitHub for their projects in the second semester and the platform helps them get used to the PR process and interface (very important for those who haven't used it much or at all previously). It may have had its wonky challenges, but GitHub Classroom fit our core need perfectly.

Also, this should be more prominently announced in the Education newsletter. I can understand wanting to paint this in a positive light, but it really should have included something like "ACTION REQUIRED by August 28, 2026 to transfer content".

My primary concern is continued support for the "team" upgrades and ESPECIALLY the related support for Codespaces. Every assignment I've ever created relies on Codespaces. Any details on this would be appreciated.

What about the Student Developer Pack? Will students still get access to Copilot or other integrated LLM models? I started a project toward the end of this semester with my class. A few students had trouble getting approved for the Student Developer Pack, and it seems they must have finally gotten approved after the change, because they keep hitting credit ceilings that the other students are not hitting (it is saying they have a free account, not a student account). Why would you make the change during school and not the summer? It has really messed with the student experience and has caused a lot of frustration.

I have been developing CodeTeach.ai, a tool to streamline GitHub-based programming assignment generation. My spring pilot went well, and I recently finished updating it for public production.

Like many instructors here, I was surprised by this announcement. I’m now working on a post-Classroom workflow that lets instructors continue using GitHub for assignment distribution, student repositories, and autograding without depending on GitHub Classroom itself.

The goal is to preserve the parts many of us still want: GitHub repositories, private workflows where possible, and GitHub Actions-based autograding, while keeping the instructor experience lightweight.

Hi everyone, CodeGrade is available for free (forever) with up to 50 students per course. You can sign up at https://www.codegrade.com.

CodeGrade includes GitHub/GitLab integration, auto-grading and all the tools you need to give students coding assignments.

This will create quite a few headaches.

We’ve developed Edugator, a coding platform for introductory computer science courses. Similar to LeetCode and HackerRank, Edugator provides programming exercises while also offering comprehensive AI-assisted authoring tools, AI tutors with guardrails, and classroom management features designed specifically for instructors. If you're interested, you can learn more here:

1. https://edugator.app/
2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641555.3705025

We have been developing and using QuickFeed for more than a decade. Some headline features:

• Beautiful web UI for students to view their assignment scores and view test logs. Teachers can manage the class roster, view results, assign grades, and much more.
• You can deploy it on your own server; it runs tests locally on the server (in Docker containers).
• Integrates with GitHub through the QuickFeed app.
• You can push new assignments (or update existing ones) directly to the assignments repository, which gets propagated to student repositories (as long as there are no conflicts).
• We have grading support for Go, Python, C#, and Java. It is easy to add more.
• It is open source under the MIT license.

There is some documentation for teachers that explains a bit more.

If anyone is interested, feel free to reach out in our Discussion forum or the Issue tracker.

This transition makes sense, even though it's unfortunate for educators who have relied on GitHub Classroom for years. I'd recommend exporting your data as soon as possible and trying one of the suggested alternatives before the August deadline to avoid last-minute issues. Hopefully the added investment and support from these partner platforms will make the migration worthwhile in the long run.

Another open-source option, from a slightly different angle: Classroom J (MIT, self-hosted, live at https://classroom.jayenashar.org/).

Fair warning that this is not a sunset project. I started it after a semester where my students kept getting 500s trying to provision their repos, not all of them and not every time, and GitHub support was no help at all. The retirement announcement landed months later and was a coincidence.

Two things came out of that.

The boring one. Provisioning here is a queued job that claims the repo in the database before it calls GitHub, so a failed attempt resumes from that record instead of creating a second repo. A student whose provision fails can simply provision again; staff can repair one from the assignment page or re-run a whole class in bulk. That does not stop GitHub's API failing. It just makes a failure something you can act on in the ten minutes before a lab.

The structural one, and the problem I could never work around: which GitHub account belongs to which enrolled student? Classroom asked the student to pick their own name from a list of everyone in the class, and every term some of them picked wrong, or accepted with the second of their two GitHub accounts and got stuck, and nothing mapped a student number back to the repos that student owned.

Classroom J inverts that:

• Students sign in with their institutional address (Google, or a passwordless email link), so identity comes from the enrolment data rather than a dropdown.
• They then link their GitHub account through OAuth, so the account is verified rather than typed or chosen.
• More than one GitHub account per student is expected. Provisioning from the wrong account is fixed by provisioning again from the right one; both repos stay attributed to that student.
• Lookup is a first-class view: search by name, student number, email or GitHub login and see that person's accounts, groups and repositories.

Otherwise it does the familiar things: classes with enrolment imported from an LMS CSV, assignments deployed from a template repo, individual or group, student self-service provisioning with no tutor in the loop, staff-defined groups, bulk provisioning and repair. Student repos are private, owned by your org, forking disabled, students added as outside collaborators so no org seat is consumed. Roles are read from real GitHub org permissions rather than maintained separately.

What it does not do, so you can rule it out quickly: no autograding and no score collection (your template's Actions still run on every student repo, it just does not gather the results), no feedback PRs, no LTI or grade passback, no deadline lockdown. If you need those, Classroom 50 and Codio genuinely are the better answer, and Classmoji, QuickFeed and Pupilfirst upthread are all worth a look too.

Honest status: it is running a real course right now (114 enrolled, 83 provisioned repos), but nobody except me has deployed it yet, so a second deployment is where the rough edges are. There is a deployment guide; expect about an hour, mostly in the Firebase and GitHub consoles. It runs on your own Firebase project against your own GitHub org, so your students' data stays yours.

If self-hosting is not realistic for you before the 28th, open an issue and say which org you teach in.

Here's another option (I've nearly got it ready): ✨ CodeHub Classroom

More announcements will be coming soon.