Artois University elevates research and curriculum with GitLab Ultimate for Education

Leading academic institutions face a critical challenge: how to provide thousands of students and researchers with industry-standard, full-featured DevSecOps tools without compromising institutional control. Many start with basic version control, but the modern curriculum demands integrated capabilities for planning, security, and advanced CI/CD.

The GitLab for Education program is designed to solve this by providing access to GitLab Ultimate for qualifying institutions, allowing them to scale their operations and elevate their academic offerings.

This article showcases a powerful success story from the Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL), a joint laboratory of Artois University and CNRS in France. After years of relying solely on GitLab Community Edition (CE), the university's move to GitLab Ultimate through the GitLab for Education program immediately unlocked advanced capabilities, transforming their teaching, research, and contribution workflows virtually overnight. This story demonstrates why GitLab Ultimate is essential for institutions seeking to deliver advanced computer science and research curricula.

GitLab Ultimate unlocked: Managing scale and driving academic value

Artois University's self-managed GitLab instance is a large-scale operation, supporting nearly 3,000 users across approximately 19,000 projects, primarily serving computer science students and researchers. While GitLab Community Edition was robust, the upgrade to GitLab Ultimate provided the sophisticated tooling necessary for managing this scale and facilitating advanced university-level work.

"We can see the difference," says Daniel Le Berre, head of research at CRIL and the instance maintainer. "It's a completely different product. Each week reveals new features that directly enhance our productivity and teaching."

The institution joined the GitLab for Education program specifically because it covers both instructional and non-commercial research use cases and offers full access to Ultimate's features, removing significant cost barriers.

Key GitLab Ultimate benefits for students and researchers

• Advanced project management at scale: Master's students now benefit from GitLab Ultimate's project planning features. This enables them to structure, track, and manage complex, long-term research projects using professional methodologies like portfolio management and advanced issue tracking that seamlessly roll up across their thousands of projects.

• Enhanced visibility: Features like improved dashboards and code previews directly in Markdown files dramatically streamline tracking and documentation review, reducing administrative friction for both instructors and students managing large project loads.

Comprehensive curriculum: From concepts to continuous delivery

GitLab Ultimate is deeply integrated into the computer science curriculum, moving students beyond simple git commands to practical DevSecOps implementation.

• Git fundamentals: Students begin by visualizing concepts using open-source tools to master Git concepts.

• Full CI/CD implementation: Students use GitLab CI for rigorous Test-Driven Development (TDD) in their software projects. They learn to build, test, and perform quality assurance using unit and integration testing pipelines—core competency made seamless by the integrated platform.

• DevSecOps for research and documentation: The university teaches students that DevSecOps principles are vital for all collaborative work. Inspired by earlier work in Delft, students manage and produce critical research documentation (PDFs from Markdown files) using GitLab, incorporating quality checks like linters and spell checks directly in the CI pipeline. This ensures high-quality, reproducible research output.

• Future-proofing security skills: The GitLab Ultimate platform immediately positions the institution to incorporate advanced DevSecOps features like SAST and DAST scanning as their research and development code projects grow, ensuring students are prepared for industry security standards.

Accelerating open source contributions with GitLab Duo

Access to the full GitLab platform, including our AI capabilities, has empowered students to make impactful contributions to the wider open source community faster than ever before.

Two Master's students recently completed direct contributions to the GitLab product, adding the ORCID identifier into user profiles. Working on GitLab.com, they leveraged GitLab Duo's AI chat and code suggestions to navigate the codebase efficiently.

"This would not have been possible without GitLab Duo," Daniel Le Berre notes. "The AI features helped students, who might have lacked deep codebase knowledge, deliver meaningful contributions in just two weeks."

This demonstrates how providing students with cutting-edge tools accelerates their learning and impact, allowing them to translate classroom knowledge into real-world contributions immediately.

Empowering open research and institutional control

The stability of the self-managed instance at Artois University is key to its success. This model guarantees institutional control and stability — a critical factor for long-term research preservation.

The institution's expertise in this area was recently highlighted in a major 2024 study led by CRIL, titled: "Higher Education and Research Forges in France - Definition, uses, limitations encountered and needs analysis" (Project on GitLab). The research found that the vast majority of public forges in French Higher Education and Research relied on GitLab. This finding underscores the consensus among academic leaders that self-hosted solutions are essential for data control and longevity, especially when compared to relying on external, commercial forges.

Unlock GitLab Ultimate for your institution today

The success story of Artois University's CRIL proves the transformative power of the GitLab for Education program. By providing free access to GitLab Ultimate, we enable large-scale institutions to:

1. Deliver a modern, integrated DevSecOps curriculum.

2. Support advanced, collaborative research projects with Ultimate planning features.

3. Empower students to make AI-assisted open source contributions.

4. Maintain institutional control and data longevity.

If your academic institution is ready to equip its students and researchers with the complete DevSecOps platform and its most advanced features, we invite you to join the program.

The program provides free access to GitLab Ultimate for qualifying instructional and non-commercial research use cases.

Apply now at https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/.