A New Brand for Open Teaching

What is trinket?

trinket is open teaching designed with you in mind. Create, prepare, teach and share your course on a powerful platform that generates simple, open class websites for you and your students.

Who is the Team?

We’re (currently) a team of six people dedicated to bringing open teaching to the world.  If you’ve been following our progress you’ll know that we started out as Coursefork.  Our vision of teacher-focused tools and open sharing of ideas and content for teaching remains the same. The new trinket brand and product are designed to reflect the values of our community: simplicity, power, and dedication to an educational mission.

What is Open Teaching?

Open teaching means teaching using open materials and providing open access to those materials on the internet.  For instance, a professor might chose to use a Creative Commons licensed textbook and create a course website that their students can access.  This allows other students to browse these materials and, perhaps more importantly, other instructors to browse and be inspired by those courses.

Why Open Teaching?

When teachers share their materials and approaches with each other, they’re able to improve faster and find others who teach the same things.  This is already happening across all levels and disiplines as educators blog, tweet, and make videos about their teaching.  trinket aims to bring the benefits of open teaching to everyone who teaches.

How do I Sign Up?

If you’d like access when the product is ready, please sign up.

If you’d like to get early access to Trinket, just email us!

We’re looking forward to building the future of open teaching together!

Hope to see you soon.

Elliott

 

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6 thoughts on “A New Brand for Open Teaching

  1. Love the new branding! Focused, elegant, and really speaks to the paint point of the new, open education audience. Congrats team!

  2. Interesting, I see this being a great tool, but I think a lot of the problems with bad teachers won’t be addressed. It might address teachers with poor knowledge of material, but honestly, most of what makes a bad teacher is intangibles like 1. Lack of passion, 2. Failure to recognize feedback from a class, 3. Inspire the students, etc.

    Maybe I’m wrong, but perhaps a hybrid approach (use of a trinket and then lay off worst teachers). Paying teachers better and recognizing their skills might be a good first step IMHO. (I’m from Canada, now living in the USA and see this as a problem here). That might naturally weed out the bad teachers due to supply/demand.

    1. Good thoughts. You’re right that openness doesn’t directly address bad teaching. But it is the only consistent way to address it indirectly: first by helping motivate and inspire teachers by seeing what each other are doing. Second, by making it easier to identify bad teaching practices and help correct them.

      The vision of an invisible hand reaching directly into classrooms and plucking out the worst teachers is compelling, but just not realistic. Nor, as I argue in this post, is there much precedent for it being effective:

      http://blog.trinket.io/teachers-wont-be-replaced/

      1. I was thinking about it this weekend and I’m tending more and more to agree with your take. I think opening up the teachers and curriculum will have a positive impact on education. I’m very curious how much contribution will occur, and how it will affect the education system, but I’m optimistic.

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