Bye bye Replit

[Tefters]

*urgh* like many things nowadays, nothing is staying free or cheap and it's all about the money.

 

While I personally didn't use this much I did recommend it a lot to students and to our ICT teachers, who never really used it with the kids up until a helpdesk ticket they raised this week wanting to start to use it but now I can close that with "too late, read this mail".

 

Hopefully they can use the free version in standalone form without team management.

 

-----

 

Dear Teachers,

 

We are grateful to play a part in your journey to train the next generation of software creators. For the past few years, we’ve helped you achieve this goal through Teams for Edu, however, we will be changing our approach starting in the coming months.

 

To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu.As of tomorrow, November 15, 2023, Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs.

 

 

 

We will continue to invest in our free plan to ensure coding is accessible to builders of any level.

 

We understand that these changes may cause significant disruption to your school year and will do our best to alleviate these concerns. We will be in touch about next steps and when product access will be removed. Our team will share resources and guidance to facilitate your next steps in the new calendar year.

 

Should you have any questions or concerns, the best way to get help is by contacting us at a dedicated support email,[email protected], where our team of support experts will be able to assist you.

 

Best,

 

The Replit Team

Edited November 14, 2023 by Tefters

[mavhc]

"I didn't use open source solutions and all I got was kicked in the teeth"

[jthompson]

Was literally looking today at whether we could start to make use of Replit. I guess this goes a long way towards answering that.

[RLR]

I started using it at the begining of this year! Wonder if we can use it stand alone for free.

[supportman]

I think this is about their teams for edu product, not the free tier which will remain.

[TechMonkey]

"I didn't use open source solutions and all I got was kicked in the teeth"

 

Ohh cool, what open source alternative to Replit do you use?

[mavhc]

I just use the local computer, many options then, IDLE, VSCode, etc

[Ironside]

I just use the local computer, many options then, IDLE, VSCode, etc

 

not suitable if you don't want kids being able to run code directly on the PC, which i remember some not wanting to do for security and anti-little-darling-doing-something-silly protection.

[mavhc]

If there's a way to exploit your system then fix it, someone will find a way to do it via Office Macro or running chrome in nosandbox mode, or vbs, or cmd file, or jscript, or disconnecting the network so gpo doesn't apply, or connecting another computer to the network, or DMA via an external port, or a bug in a driver, or mock folders, or windows printer driver folder etc etc

[jthompson]

not suitable if you don't want kids being able to run code directly on the PC, which i remember some not wanting to do for security and anti-little-darling-doing-something-silly protection.

 

We use VirtualBox, which reliably sandboxes students' coding. We've explored other options from time to time (Replit, GitHub Classroom) to reduce the reliance on VMs deployed to ICT classroom PCs, but we always seem to come back to using our stalwart VirtualBox VMs!

[ITGuyNW]

How do you have the virtualbox VMs? Just create one for every student and host somewhere?

[TechMonkey]

I just use the local computer, many options then, IDLE, VSCode, etc

 

So no full alternative to Replit? So your snarky comment was pointless and unhelpful? Oh, how disappointing.

[mavhc]

Here's the most popular https://pypl.github.io/ODE.html

Here's a single user docker container running vscode via a web interface https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-code-server/

Here's open source alternatives https://alternativeto.net/software/repl-it/?license=opensource

Here's vscode online https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/vscode-web

https://editor.raspberrypi.org/en/ source code is https://github.com/raspberrypifoundation

[jthompson]

How do you have the virtualbox VMs? Just create one for every student and host somewhere?

 

To clarify, this is just VMs on classroom PCs, so not available to students outside of the classroom at all. There may still be a case for Replit free accounts for those students who want to do coding out of school, but the classroom side of things is likely to carry on being based on the local VMs and producing work there.

[flyinghaggis]

Does anyone know why Replit removed the "Teams for Education" feature having made it free last year?

 

https://blog.replit.com/teamsforedu_free

 

It seems like an odd business decision to make something they previously charged for free then to remove it completely? Especially as there are clearly plenty of schools/customers who would have happily paid them for it given the functionality it offers and will now have to go elsewhere

Edited November 21, 2023 by flyinghaggis

[jthompson]

I'm assuming that it's a case of it not being a focus for them, and so {businessDecision}.

[flyinghaggis]

I'm assuming that it's a case of it not being a focus for them, and so {businessDecision}.

 

Yeah, guess maybe they felt the educational sector wasn't a market they wanted to focus on anymore. Seemed a bit odd for them as it looks like education was their primary market when they first start out.

[dmj]

Yeah, guess maybe they felt the educational sector wasn't a market they wanted to focus on anymore. Seemed a bit odd for them as it looks like education was their primary market when they first start out.

 

I guess there's too many free ones for them to be competitive.

 

Ohh cool, what open source alternative to Replit do you use?

 

We're using Jupyter, along with some big name companies (Google,Microsoft,Oracle,IBM). It's free, opensource and you can host a multiuser environment yourself.

It's not really 'focused' on education rather professional developers, but I'm pretty sure a teacher could make some nice interactive notebooks for it (there's probably a lot available, I've not looked).

https://jupyter.org/

 

If you're hosting yourself there's plugins for auth to Google,Azure etc and there's howto's about hosting here: https://jupyter.org/hub

 

There's also Anaconda, but I've not much experience with that https://www.anaconda.com/open-source

[dhicks]

There's also Anaconda

 

Anaconda now own PythonAnywhere, which can provide education establishments with a web-accesible environment to develope and run Python applications in:

 

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

[StevieM]

Anaconda now own PythonAnywhere, which can provide education establishments with a web-accesible environment to develope and run Python applications in:

 

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

 

They also now own Edublocks - a halfway-house from Scratch to Python, developed by a kid from Preston when he was 12 to help his mates learn coding.*

 

(*Or something like that.)

[flyinghaggis]

Our computing department have been unable to find a suitable cloud/online ODE replacement and aren't prepared to use any kind of VM (local or hosted) to replace it. Has anyone reverted back to locally installing IDE's (Python, Visual Studio, etc) on AD networked Windows computers following the demise of Replit for Education?

 

If so what steps have you implemented to secure domain connected AD Windows computers. We've been trying to put together a list of options above the usual Group policy and user account ones already in place :-

 

• Tightening up networking switch config (ACLs, VLANs, open accessible ports, etc)
  
• Tweaking locally install Firewalls/Antivirus/Security software to restrict network/internet access for specific apps.
  
• Adding an IPS / NDR solution to report suspicious network traffic and behaviour.
  
• Providing staff with a monitoring tool along the lines of Impero/ABTutor to allow them to better supervise pupils in labs
  

 

Any other suggestions?

Edited December 14, 2023 by flyinghaggis

[mavhc]

I suggest everyone does all those things anyway.

 

Log things, enable auditing of failed logins

 

https://github.com/cisagov/lme

[flyinghaggis]

I suggest everyone does all those things anyway.

 

Log things, enable auditing of failed logins

 

https://github.com/cisagov/lme

 

I agree that ideally those things should already be in place. The Challenge is most of them cost money to implement which may not be on offer. Even the ones which technically don't (like amending network switch configurations) require in-house expertise/training/time which also may not be readily available.

[dmj]

Our computing department have been unable to find a suitable cloud/online ODE replacement and aren't prepared to use any kind of VM (local or hosted) to replace it.

 

Could you expand on this a bit? ie what's the barrier to using a VM to host a platform? setup/maintenance costs? I'd argue that those are at worst equal to and at best cheaper than running a system on multiple machines.

[flyinghaggis]

Could you expand on this a bit? ie what's the barrier to using a VM to host a platform? setup/maintenance costs? I'd argue that those are at worst equal to and at best cheaper than running a system on multiple machines.

 

Their argument was that whatever VM solution we implement use it'll be more awkward for the pupils to login, save work, print, access the internet, etc than it otherwise would be if the apps were directly installed on domain connected workstations. We currently use VirtualBox VMs for coding/web/database/development which can't be covered using Replit and the computing staff aren't happy with it as a solution for the above reasons. Plus, any hosted solution will potentially be expensive whereas installing the software onto client PCs is a no-cost option in terms of their departmental budget.

 

Essentially they've refused to consider it as they want the software installed on client devices now that Replit is no longer usable.

Edited December 14, 2023 by flyinghaggis