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You cannot just use the build directory. If you want to distribute the binaries only you must invoke catkin_make install which will install everything into a local install folder. Then you can delete the build, devel and src folders, or just zip up only the install folder and distribute that. However, the binaries need to be compiled for the correct architecture that your students computer has and any dependencies you do not have in your workspace when you invoke catkin_make need to also be installed by your students before being used.

If you are only on Ubuntu then you can have bloom generate you a deb-src and then you can compile that and distrbute the .deb file and students can install it with dpkg -i your_distributable.deb. If you follow this part of the pre-release tutorial:

http://wiki.ros.org/bloom/Tutorials/PrereleaseTest#bloom.2BAC8-Tutorials.2BAC8-PrereleaseTest.2BAC8-indigo.Perform_the_pre-release_locally

After the git-buildpackage command you'll have a .deb file that you can install with dpkg -i. This will only work if all of the packages your package depends on are released into ROS. If you want to build multiple closed-sourced packages then you'll need to setup a custom build farm so that you can have a full release lifecycle for your packages, allowing you to release and build binaries for one package and then release yet another package which depends on that package.