While it depends on the use case, our GitHub Enterprise license is often better suited for use by university administrative units than for teaching and learning purposes.

Though there are a number of benefits included with our Enterprise plan, such as free GitHub Actions minutes for private repositories, there are also limitations. For example, our license does not include certain features like Codespaces (virtual developer environments), GitHub Copilot (AI coding assistance), and GitHub Classroom.

Students and faculty, however, can register directly with GitHub and receive free access to these and other tools for coding, teaching, and learning. To learn more, visit Explore the benefits of teaching and learning with GitHub Education.

Note that our institution is not participating in the GitHub Campus Program.

Codespaces and Copilot

Keep in mind that free, personal GitHub accounts can use Codespaces compute and storage resources up to a certain amount without being charged. See GitHub's Codespaces pricing documentation for details.

For staff, we are currently unable to support Codespaces and Copilot subscriptions managed and billed through our enterprise license. However, individual GitHub users can upgrade to a paid plan (for Codespaces) and/or purchase Copilot as an individual, and then use these features when working on repositories within our enterprise.

In general, students and teachers who have registered with GitHub and individuals who have paid for these features can use them when working on repositories within our enterprise license. However, this may depend on organization settings - see the Questions section below if you are unsure about this.

Of course, it's also fine to use these features in personally-owned repositories or repositories that are part of an organization outside our enterprise.

Caution

As an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, caution is required when using GitHub Copilot - careful steps may need to be taken to ensure that you understand how it integrates with your environment, makes coding suggestions, and whether content from your repository may be automatically shared with GitHub. This can be complicated.

See the following GitHub documentation pages for additional details:

Also, please refer to the CU System Guidance for Artificial Intelligence Tools Use web page and additional AI guidance and security resources for your specific CU campus.

Questions?

The GitHub Enterprise license is shared among all the CU campuses. Please reach out to your campus GitHub administrators with questions.

CU Boulder users can create a support case for the OIT Platform Engineering team.