Blog

We are excited to announce the launch of Edtr.io 1.0 Beta!

February 29, 2020

After months of hard work, testing, feedback-loops, more work and more testing we are giddy with excitement to finally present to the world: Edtr.io!

We started developing this beautiful piece of software for and with Serlo.org, Germany's biggest free e-learning platform and Schul-Cloud, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research to enable teachers to create their class material in the cloud and share it with their students online. Similarly, content on Serlo.org is contributed by a community of educators, who can use the platform to create and share their teaching resources.

Teachers are not famously tech-savvy though, and very few are willing to mess around with fiddly web editors to prepare their classes online. And fiddly web editors really was all there was available open source. The first requirement for Edtr.io was, therefore, to make creating content online as simple as editing a Word document - or simpler. Call it WYSIWYG, visual editing, whatever. Just easy, the way a lay person would want it to be.

The second requirement was total adaptability, to cater to the pedagogical particularities of any subject. Quite frequently, teachers would request plugin features that were plainly outside the technological scope of the editor in use. With the aim to provide quality education for every subject, this needed to change.

So, having previously collaborated on ReactPage (formerly known as ORY editor), we took the best ideas from that project and rebuilt it from scratch with a new focus on adaptability, smooth UX and content styling. The Edtr.io we launch today is a react-based web editor that is layman-level intuitive as well as versatile in its application - well beyond the educational context. It is designed to offer a solution to any project or business that requires non-techy people to do web-editing - from email marketing to archaeological archiving.