Edit on Thursday, November 12: We've prolonged the Classroom deprecation date to 1/31/2021 to give teachers whose fall classes carry over into the new year extra time to transition.

Edit on Friday, October 2: You can now migrate your Classroom assignments to a free Team by clicking on this link and choosing which Classrooms to migrate. Check out these helpful resources to get the most out of Teams.

Unit tests, matching tests, model solutions, submissions, students, and TAs will not being migrated at this time. You can easily reinvite students in a FERPA/COPPA/privacy compliant way by following these steps. The new Team will be free for 4 months and soon we’ll be sharing “financial aid” (i.e. free team) options for the spring for those with budget difficulties as well. Those who can pay now will be able to lock in a lower rate. Student data and work can also be exported from your Classroom by following these steps.

Today our legacy Classroom product experienced an outage, and there were multiple outages last week as well. We have been working incredibly hard, missing sleep and working weekends trying to keep the Classroom product up, but we are realizing now that we won’t be able to maintain smooth service on Classroom moving forward.

We have not been marketing or promoting Classroom, but it has been growing on word of mouth alone. Classroom and the core Repl.it platform are on separate codebases. We have not actively improved Classroom since 2017. Since then, we have been continually improving the core Repl.it platform. Although we have been planning the transition for a long time, we have spent millions of dollars in hosting and maintenance costs keeping Classroom up to not disrupt students and teachers who depend on it. We won’t be able to keep doing this.

In June, we announced that we were going to release Teams, a new product built on top of the core Repl.it platform, so educators can take advantage of everything we have built since 2017.

With Teams, you can use live multiplayer repls with Zoom breakout rooms. You can grade your students’ work with automated unit tests (right now you can build/fork simple & fully automated autograders, and autograding should get easier in the future with product updates). You can leave feedback with Google docs-style comments directly in-line in your students’ code. You can add PDF, markdown, or other files to repls to give students instructions. You can still embed repls in your LMS. And support for group projects is also coming very soon.

Please answer this 1-question survey to let us know what else you'd like to see in Teams.

We've also simplified Teams pricing to $35/team/month or $350/team/year (2 months free) with an unlimited number of students. And there are more billing improvements on the roadmap.

We had planned to slowly phase out Classroom this academic year while giving teachers ample time to transition to Teams or other services. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We knew that Classroom was not in the best shape, and we had a sneaking suspicion that it might not scale well. Nevertheless, we decided to do our best to keep the product up-and-running.

Unfortunately and despite not accepting new Classroom customers since August, Classroom grew past our projections, past a breaking point where it’s now bringing down the whole site. This is due to flaws in the legacy code that will not impact the core Repl.it platform once we have transitioned. Classroom makes up less than 5% of our active user-base, yet it’s disrupting Repl.it for everyone.

Here’s what we are planning to do:

We will give you the product for free for the remainder of the semester because the last thing we want to do is to add unnecessary stress to find a new solution when so much else is changing in the world. There will be options for “financial aid” (i.e. free/reduced pricing) after this semester.

We are planning to release migration tools tomorrow (or as soon as we possibly can) and we encourage everyone to migrate. Right now, it’s best to assume that Classroom won’t return to running smoothly, but we will do our absolute best to keep it floating, if only to migrate your materials.

These are not easy times to be teaching, and the work all of you are doing is essential and valuable. Once again, thanks for using Repl.it and sticking with us through this transition. And thanks for educating the next generation of coders!

Amjad CEO & Founder [email protected]

P.S. Here is a growing list of resources to get the most out of Teams.