Is GitHub Classroom Abandonware?

[djholt]

Hi everyone,

I personally feel it's long past time to address the elephant in the room.

It's become apparent that either 1) GitHub Classroom is no longer being maintained by an active development team within GitHub, or 2) if it is being maintained, GitHub has decided not to prioritize customer-facing support channels, such as in these community discussions.

I'm not sure the second reality is any better than the first. Bottom line: many of us utilize GitHub Classroom and related tools in our day-to-day educational spaces, and even intermittent issues cause significant pain points for educators and our students. The current level of support and communication from GitHub is not acceptable. If we should not expect this situation to change, we deserve to be made aware of this deprioritization so that we can find alternative products and solutions. Ghosting customers is a bad look.

Please up-vote this discussion thread if you share these concerns or are unsatisfied with the current support, or lack thereof, being provided by GitHub to its education platform users.

[eblanton]

This has been the case for several years now. Support is non-existent, and failures are common. I've been advocating for moving off of GitHub for a while, within my department.

It's awesome when they just don't approve your proof of educator status and you can't tell why and there's no one to talk to ... and then one day it's just magically better.

[DerekHarter]

I agree, and it has become so much of an issue that I am actively looking for alternative solutions to try and keep the equivalent functionality for my own programming intensive class teaching workflows. I would be happy to hear from others in a thread like this of alternative solutions that might be available now, or in development for the near future, for providing services like GitHub classrooms for teaching.

To be clear, I have really appreciated GitHub classrooms and what it provides for educators. I think it is important for students to get hands on experience with real tools and workflows that they are likely to need to use and will find valuable in their post education careers.

But I think that the lack of any kind of support or response from GitHub support has led me to conclude that I really cannot rely on GitHub Classrooms being a stable platform for me to build my classroom activities and workflows on in the current to near future.

[djholt]

I fully agree with this sentiment. GitHub Classroom is built largely using GitHub API functionality that is openly available to everyone. And as we've continued to struggle with ongoing defects and support issues with GitHub Classroom over the last several years, I've many times considered building my own implementation from scratch.

But I wonder if there are other existing, open source solutions available that might save some time in that regard. If anyone discovers existing work that might be a reasonable starting point, please share. :)

[jintrone]

Completely agree with this. It's sad, b/c it has so much potential. However, if you think about it, there's not much that couldn't be accomplished via the api, and with that, it would be relatively simple to put together a web-app that replicates (or improves upon!) GHE functionality. I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to do it entirely on my own, and the solution would have to be a locally hosted service unless someone can donate server space. But I'd be happy to contribute a little time if someone here wanted to help put something together. Reply if any takers...

[DerekHarter]

I would be too. I haven't found any github projects yet that seem directly trying this, but like you say seems like it would be a reasonable approach to try. There seem to be a few repositories of publish small python scripts to do things from command line, all about 4-6 years old usually.

• https://github.com/danwallach/github-classroom-utils
• https://github.com/ccannon94/github-classroom-utilties

And I am not familiar with, but apparently there are extensions to the GH cli for classroom:

• https://github.com/github/gh-classroom

[eblanton]

I think the answer is for universities to move to something like Forgejo, and develop a simple assignment distribution frontend for the Forgejo API for the "hard cases" like self-selected groups. In most cases we know generally who the students are, and in my case, usually I could just blast out a new repo with fixed permissions for each project I assign. I can't do that on GH because of API rate limiting, but with an in-house solution it would be trivial -- and one less tie to Microsoft. OneDrive and Exchange are already millstones around my neck, why add GH Classroom?

[DerekHarter]

Interesting, I wasn't really necessarily looking to replace all of GitHub. Do you know if Forgejo has something equivalent to GitHub actions that can be run on server side resources in response to events in the repository?

[jintrone]

Right - I use gh classroom, but I think it’s just making standard API calls at the end of the day. Forejo looks cool, thanks for pointing it out! But in the interest of getting something out the door quickly, it seems to me a smart dev path would be to build to GH with an abstraction layer, and then down the road add support for other APIs (Forejo, GitLab). I don’t trust Microsoft, but for now at least the educator benefits are pretty good and I use code spaces for my classes heavily. Development could go pretty quickly; as a rough cut, necessary input would be: 1) a document that lays out in detail the functionality required (business logic), sketched in terms of the atomic API calls that need to be made 2) a design document for the front end UI that includes the specific pages and functions each page provide 3) a visual sketch of each page The project could mirror existing functionality, or could be a subset, or could even be slightly different (for example, I’d really like to have a nice solution for pushing updates / bug fixes to assignments from my master course repo). With these ingredients, the web app itself is really pretty trivial. On Sep 9, 2025, at 5:49 PM, Derek Harter ***@***.***> wrote: I would be too. I haven't found any github projects yet that seem directly trying this, but like you say seems like it would be a reasonable approach to try. There seem to be a few repositories of publish small python scripts to do things from command line, all about 4-6 years old usually. * https://github.com/danwallach/github-classroom-utils * https://github.com/ccannon94/github-classroom-utilties And I am not familiar with, but apparently there are extensions to the GH cli for classroom: * https://github.com/github/gh-classroom — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#172675 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADUUGOAKIIJBE4V5XOJY7T3R5DNJAVCNFSM6AAAAACF3L3S7SVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTIMZVGYZTMOA>. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[DerekHarter]

Thinking about a quick-and-dirty cli only approach to prototype some ideas. Mirroring existing functionality seems like a good thing to think about first:

• Creating a GH Classroom seems mainly about creating a GitHub organization that the classroom is associated with.
• Then usually I create the roster of students, just their list of names that match my LMS gradebook and make it convenient eventually to associate a github id with my actual student name in my gradebook.
• Create an assignment. This is a combination of a github repo template location I have created beforehand for the assignment (among other things, like due date, whether to create a Feedback pull request, etc, and ignoring support for group vs. individual assignments), and some mechanism so that an invitation link for the assignment, when clicked can:
  • create a new repository using the assignment template (fork currently, right?) owned by the classroom organization
  • add the student github id as an outside collaborator for the organization with r/w access to this new specific student repository for the assignment (this is what is currently causing this whole mess).

Not sure how I would conveniently reproduce what happens when clicking the invitation link from a command line only tool. If I have my roster of students, and know all of their github ids, I could create a script that generates a repository for each student, and creates an outside collaborator invitation. This would send an e-mail that the student would need to accept so they get access to the created repository in the organization. So without a web interface, I would probably need to collect github ids from students by hand and match with their names for the assignment invitation script.

Of course there is other functionality after that when running an assignment. Especially the display of all students and progress on the assignment from the autograder / github actions is something I use a lot, but seems also like information that might be available from API calls on the repositories owned by the classroom organization.