About Us - Our Vision

Grasple is a social enterprise from the Netherlands. Our mission is to make knowledge openly accessible to everyone. We strive to help people learn difficult concepts by practicing with high-quality exercises, created by educators who build on each other’s work.

“If I have seen further, it is because I have been standing on the shoulders of giants”.
– Sir Isaac Newton.

Just like scientific papers are starting to become openly accessible, we are now working to make learning materials openly accessible.

Created by Educators

We are a social enterprise, because we are not in education to make money. We started as teachers ourselves, noticing ways in which digital tools can help us create more flexible and more personal approaches. We wanted to help our own students learn better, more efficiently and support teachers by creating more space for them to offer stimulating activities. That is why we started the Grasple platform: an easy-to-use platform where teachers can find, edit, and share open learning materials. They can share them with other educators and with students so they can practice at their own time and pace.

Free for individuals, organizations pay for integrations and support

We do not rely on ads or a few wealthy donors. Instead, we believe it’s best to rely on a sustainable open business model. Our model is that we do not charge for content, making it open to everyone with an internet connection. Universities and schools who want to integrate the material into their formal education offering, can opt to purchase additional LMS integrations, functionalities and dedicated support. This way, we can provide the best service and support to universities and schools, while keeping the knowledge open for everyone.

The biggest open practice & teaching platform in the Netherlands

Since 2014, we have helped over 40 institutions and growing. We started in the Netherlands, where we are now the leading open practice and teaching platform, serving around 65% of Higher Education institutions. We co-create together with our customers, and subject experts. We believe our existing customers required our dedicated focus. This strategy is paying off, as we now have long-term agreements with universities, such as Utrecht University, the largest university in the Netherlands (you can read their customer story here). For a few years we are continuously opening up to international universities (from the Nordics, Australia, the UK and America), which already make about 30% of our customers by now.

Want to learn more about how we help universities and schools? Please contact us at hello@grasple.com; we’re happy to exchange thoughts.

What’s coming: Github for education

Currently reusing or creating open materials is difficult. Often, they are not modular, their quality is unknown and they cannot be edited easily. So it takes teachers lots of time to actually use them in their education.

To solve those issues, we are working towards a Github (a collaboration platform) for learning materials. We envision an open platform in which teachers in higher education are able to:

• Find relevant materials through a specialised search engine
• Quickly judge quality, because:
  • community content is curated by the Grasple team
  • teachers can review each others work through a smart review system
• Edit all open materials and work on your own versions
• Download the exercises in an open format
• Reuse and combine high-quality materials by simply dragging them into your personal course

We are humbled that so many teachers already use Grasple to find, edit and share open exercises. Nevertheless, we still see lots of room for improvement. Thus we will not stop working on making knowledge understandable, personal and openly accessible to everyone in the world.

Pim Bellinga and Thijs Gillebaart
Founders of Grasple