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.
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.
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.
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.