Gear-up and unlock the newest GitHub Global Campus features

At GitHub Education our goal is to provide students with the tools and opportunities needed to be successful in the real world. And for teachers we’re committed to providing the tools and resources to automate your workflow as well as provide support to best cultivate the student community. We have heard your feedback and over the last few months there has been a flurry of feature launches to support you better. With new semesters and educational journeys on the horizon, now is the perfect time to jump in, learn and gain access to all of the tools, programs, and resources, all in one place!

Stepping into Global Campus

While applying to join Global Campus doesn’t require essay writing, it does require each student and teacher to pass through our proprietary fraud detection system. This verification is really important to be able to create and maintain a safe and inclusive learning community. No bad actors, no marketers, no scammers allowed!

If you’re not yet a part of the Global Campus community, no worries! You can apply to join if you are a student or a teacher.

Start the new education journey with new tools for students

Growing projects with Global Campus Community Exchange

Over the last few months students have been learning and contributing to each other’s projects and building engaging communities all within the safe space of the Community Exchange within GitHub Global Campus. The Community Exchange offers the ability for students to connect with peers to either further the path of becoming an open source contributor or upskill further within the software development realm. From discovering new projects and repositories to submitting their own, students are surrounded by others also eager to collaborate.

In addition, students are growing their network and building their portfolio which can yield many professional opportunities. Being featured within the Community Exchange also brings exposure and visibility for student projects, allowing more community members to see interesting and varied projects and gives focus on how to be an open source maintainer.

Hosting hackathons in the cloud

Hosting and organizing a hackathon or codefest is no small feat, but with the right software and guides any student can empower student hacker communities. GitHub Global Campus has a new experience focusing on tools that help organize, promote, and communicate any upcoming hackathon, no matter the skill level.

The Hackathon in the Cloud Experience contains guides from Major League Hacking and HackMIT to help guide and organize efficiently. Offers from Typeform and Mailgun elevate the event promotion to a higher grade. And Git extensions from GitLens allow for information to be communicated and track commits all throughout the event.

Managing your secrets in the Student Developer Pack with Doppler

A highly requested tool finally arrives within the Global Campus Student Developer Pack! Doppler is a universal secret manager that aims to reduce the stress and issues associated with managing secrets with GitHub Actions. Students can now inject secrets from Doppler into GitHub Actions and avoid risking exposure with .env files or hard-coded values. With rollback support, secret referencing, and automatic redeploys, Doppler can supercharge a student’s GitHub Secrets management experience in local development, CI/CD, and production.

Best tools to make CS learning accessible in your classroom

Codespaces x GitHub Classroom for Teachers

The launch of Global Campus for Teachers came with an exciting feature for the educator community: the power of Codespaces. Codespaces allows teachers to integrate a Visual Student Code-backed editor, terminal, and debugger alongside GitHub version control into GitHub Classroom, which provides a scalable solution for quickly getting CS students starting using any virtual device that has a browser.

Mixing Codespaces with GitHub Classroom allows teachers to standardize environments, hardware specifications, and other editor settings so that all students have the same setup no matter where they work with significantly less troubleshooting.

While GitHub Team and GitHub Enterprise users are billed for Codespaces in a pay-as-you-go model, your Global Campus teacher status gives you a no-cost monthly allowance of Codespaces hours to use in your classroom. The free allowance is estimated to be enough for a class of 50 with five assignments per month, on a 2 core machine with one Codespace stored per student, which is ample to have students creating projects and completing assignments.The Codespaces Education benefit is currently in public beta. During the beta release, you will not be charged if you exceed the free allowance, so begin integrating Codespaces in your classroom and start enabling curriculum and classes around GitHub’s industry-standard toolset and help prepare students for a career in tech.

Reuse assignment in your classroom

Teachers, we have heard your feedback! GitHub Classroom now gives the ability to easily reuse an Assignment across Classrooms and/or from semester to semester. You don’t have to now manually and repeatedly create new assignments using the same template repository.

Using ‘Reuse assignment’ you can copy single / multiple assignments and the associated template repository across Classrooms and organizations. The copied assignment will include the assignment details, such as name, source repository, autograding and preferred editor. Learn more.

Copilot now free for teachers

GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer, is now free for all teachers verified on GitHub Global Campus.

GiHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that uses OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real time, right from your editor. Earlier this summer, following a successful year long technical preview with more than 1.2 million developers, we launched GitHub Copilot for individuals. The feedback received from the community has made it abundantly clear: AI is one of the best tools to empower the next generation of developers. With GitHub Copilot, developers have more time and space to focus on solving bigger problems and building even better software.

We recognize the challenge of integrating Copilot into the classroom and have been working with partners to identify early opportunities for assessing Copilot’s impact. Dive into a few case studies around professors adapting existing teaching methods and join the conversation with other teachers on GitHub Global Campus.

Time to get started

New features on the GitHub Global Campus await you. If you are a student or a teacher and you haven’t joined Global Campus yet, apply for the Global Campus Student or Global Campus Teacher benefits. Also join the GitHub Education Discussions and connect with other students and teachers!

Written by

Matthew Dyson

@dysomatic

Divya Vaishnavi

@divais