[Someone1234]

What's the cost of this? And who pays it (e.g. each individual student, the school/department/grader, etc)?

I like GitHub a lot, but I will say they can be rather pricey. $7/month for their smallest private plan, you can literally run your own VM in the cloud (e.g. on AWS/Azure) for that amount (and run Gitlab), get a terabyte of cloud storage (which you can store hundreds of Git repositories in), or go to one of their competitors.

And, yes, this absolutely does require a private repository if you want to avoid cheating.

[johndbritton]

It's totally free. Teachers can request free private repositories at https://education.github.com/discount

[deskamess]

This needs some videos to show what it can do. Not many teachers know what GitHub is and if I wanted to suggest this as a possible option I could not explain it to them.

Maybe a video showing the creation of an assignment and sending it out (url via email, is it?), students completing the assignment, and teachers looking over a completed assignment.

If that is a poor example of what this does then I missed the point entirely.

[nickstinemates]

> Not many teachers know what GitHub is

That's rather unfortunate, as more and more of the people putting their degree to work definitely need to know what it is, especially in start ups.

[kennydude]

My university showed us 'RCS'...

[johndbritton]

Thanks for the suggestion, we're working on more and better documentation for teachers.

[reledi]

Anytime there's a GitHub story on HN, someone mentions an alternative. I also find GitHub pricey, at least for personal usage. But I'll never self host a solution or go with a competitor as long as GitHub continues to be the most convenient option and delivers the best user experience. I don't see that changing anytime soon.