[yareally]

I used the html5 boilerplate a few years ago for a course when I was an undergraduate without issues. This was for a course at a large, well known university. It didn't even occur to me to ask for permission, but html and css were just secondary to the class material, since it was about server side development.

What was the focus of the course? I don't think you make it clear if the website was front-end code only (html/css/js) or if it also tied in backend code and a database.

Pretty much, every professor I ever had told us we could use whatever libraries/code snippets we wanted on projects (as long as the snippet/library wasn't a drop in replacement for the purpose of the assignment of course), so long as we cited where we got them from and if asked, could explain exactly what they did.