GitHub has a new program that aims to get GitHub adopted by educational and training institutions. The GitHub Education bundle includes free access to GitHub Enterprise and the support offered by its Business Plan in addition to developers tools for students and workflows for teachers.

GitHub is already free to students and teachers for classroom use so at first this might not seem significantly different, but even though the GitHub Education program doesn't include anything completely new it still brings new benefits.

The existing components it combines are:

• GitHub Student Developer Pack - free access to a range of tools and credits for using services 
• GitHub Classroom - automates repository creation and access control, making it easy to distribute starter code and collect assignments
• GitHub Campus Expert - training in public speaking, technical writing, community leadership and software development skills (program currently closed while changes being made to it)
• GitHub Campus Advisor - online training to learn how to teach with GitHub

According to the GitHub blog GitHub Education is a free program for "schools". The type of educational institutions it is inteded for is:

a teaching-focused institution that grants degrees or certificates. 

The first six GitHub Education Schools includes two universities, Gallaudet University and the University of New Hampshire, two colleges, Santa Barbara City College and St. Louis Community College, two coding schools, 42 Silicon Valley and Ubiqum Code Academy in Spain.

GitHub Education schools benefit from:

• Free access to GitHub Enterprise or Business Hosted for all  technical departments
• Automated access to premium GitHub Education features, like the GitHub Student Developer Pack
• Exclusive access to new features, and GitHub Education-specific swag
• Teacher training to master Git and GitHub with our Campus Advisors program

GitHub aims to have school both large and small join the program. Outlining how the new GitHub Education site states:

To qualify, your school must be a teaching-focused institution that grants degrees or certificates. And in order to receive the benefits, your schools needs to:

• Offer GitHub to all of your technical departments
• Show off your school’s logo on our website as a GitHub Education school
• Receive regular announcements from GitHub Education
• For each department using GitHub, appoint an administrator to go through our teacher-training program

Having trained teachers is a prerequisite for participating in the program - specifically a person from each department has to undergo GitHub's Campus Advisers training . This online training, delivered using GitHub Classroom as hands-on assignments, consists of four modules:

Git basics - Understand how Git works so you're more prepared to help your students when they get stuck

Individual work - Create, distribute and collect coding exercises for students to complete individually using GitHub Classroom

Group work - Strategies for creating group learning experiences that parallel real-world software development

Student programs - Opportunities for you to encourage self-directed technical education outside the classroom

With GitHub now becoming part of Microsoft and Microsoft's existing interest in education it will be interesting to see how this develops or even survives.

More Information

GitHub Education

GitHub Education, a free program for schools

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