disclaimer: i work for berkeley EECS, but have no association w/these faculty or class.

TL;DR: they probably wanted to save some money by not paying our instructional group to do the hosting, and instead are (most likely) paying github for hosting. because they're doing this themselves, it means that things like real, working SSL certs are their responsibility, and most likely were "too hard" or would take "too long" to set up properly.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯