The honest answers, before you sign up.

Is it really free — what’s the catch?

Folio Classroom is free for individual instructors, and there’s no catch. You create assignments, collect submissions, and grade them at no cost. Folio makes its money from institutions that adopt the whole platform and from individual research features some of your students may choose to upgrade for. Running your class costs you nothing.

Do my students need to create accounts?

They open your assignment link and submit — the flow guides them through a lightweight sign-in so their work can carry a verifiable certificate, but there’s nothing for you to provision and no roster to build first. You hand out one link; they’re in.

Does it work alongside Canvas, Moodle, or Blackboard?

Yes — that’s the whole idea. Folio runs beside your campus LMS, it doesn’t replace it. Drop your assignment link into the LMS, your syllabus, or an email. Your official grades and roster stay in the campus system; Folio just owns the part it does best: collecting writing you can trust.

How long does it take to set up my first class?

Minutes. There’s no course shell to configure and no import step. Sign up, create an assignment with a title, prompt, and due date, and share the link. That’s the setup.

Does using Folio report anything to my department or IT?

No. When you use Folio as an individual instructor, nothing reports to an administrator — there’s no admin dashboard watching your class unless your institution has formally set up its own Folio tenant. Your class is between you and your students. You know your institution’s policies on third-party tools better than we do, so it’s worth a glance, but Folio itself notifies no one.

What if my university already has a Folio tenant?

Then your personal instructor account and any institution membership are one identity in two contexts. What you do in your own courses stays yours; what happens inside the institution’s space stays there. The two don’t bleed into each other.

How is this different from an AI detector like Turnitin?

A detector gives you a similarity or “AI-likelihood” percentage you then have to interpret and defend — and false positives fall on honest students. Folio doesn’t guess. It builds an Integrity Certificate from the student’s own work: how the writing took shape, which sources they actually cited, and any AI assistance they disclosed. It’s proof of process, not a probability.

Can students just paste in AI-written text to game it?

The certificate reflects the writing process, not a single final snapshot, so a paste-and-submit reads very differently from work that developed over time. And because AI use is disclosed rather than hunted, students have a clear, honest path — which is exactly what protects the ones doing the work.

What if a student appeals a grade over integrity?

You point to the certificate. Instead of defending a detector’s percentage in a hearing, you have a concrete record of how the work was produced. It moves the conversation from suspicion to evidence.

What happens to my students’ work and data?

Students own their accounts and their work. Folio doesn’t sell student data, and submissions are processed to produce the certificate and support your grading — not repackaged for anything else. Our data-protection page lays out the specifics.

What about FERPA and formal data agreements?

As an individual instructor you decide what work runs through Folio, and students control their own accounts. If your institution requires a formal data-processing agreement or a FERPA review before you adopt a tool at scale, that’s an institution-level conversation we’re glad to have — it’s not something an individual instructor typically needs to run one class.