Open authoring
The student authors freely. The institution holds the record.
Students and staff build pages, gather them into sites, and share them inside and outside the organisation. Every committed version is kept, and the record belongs to the institution rather than to whoever happened to set the site up.
A quire is a folded gathering of leaves, bound into a permanent whole. The name is the product: pages authored freely, gathered and bound into something still producible three years later.
The problem
Every previous attempt failed the same way.
Students have always been able to build things. They set up a blog, a wiki, a site of their own, and they fill it with genuinely good work.
What no tool delivered was the other half. The institution ended up outside the arrangement entirely, and by the time anyone needed the work back it was on a platform nobody could reach.
- No ownership of the record.
- No version history the institution controlled.
- No link to the course it belonged to.
- No confidence the assessment policy even permitted it.
The failure was never authoring. It was custody.
Where does it live?
On a platform the institution governs, or on a site a student set up in their own name and can take down the week after they graduate?
Is the version saved?
Not the final file. The working state at the moment it was committed, kept as its own version, visible to the person marking it.
What happens when someone comes back three years later?
An appeal, an audit, an accreditation review. The question is whether the artefact can still be produced, exactly as it stood.
Ask these of any tool, including the one already in use
The three claims
Authoring, custody, governance. Most tools hold two.
Every authoring tool on the market puts the institution onto a second platform with a second identity layer. The moment it does, the governance claim collapses, because the record now lives somewhere the institution does not fully control.
Authoring
An expressive space, not a form
Text, images, media and structure the author chooses, built up over weeks rather than dumped in at the end.
Custody
The institution holds it
Every published version kept as its own version, locked at the deadline, and held on the institution's side of the line.
Governance
Inside the systems already in place
It sits in the course, knows the roster, connects to the gradebook, and is still producible on demand years later.
| Solution | Expressive authoring | Custody | Governance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student-built sitesWordPress, a blog, a wiki | Yes | No | No |
| A course assignmentA file, uploaded once | No | Yes | Yes |
| Portfolio platformsThe ANZ incumbents | Yes | Partial | Second platform, second login |
| Quyer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Every version kept
Nothing overwritten. The whole record, over time.
Every published version is kept. Preview any earlier state, or restore it, without losing the one that came after. For a student building an artefact across a semester, that means the working is visible, not just the final submission.
For the academic, the development is right there in the record: what changed, when, and in what order. The version submitted at the deadline is locked and held, and every state that led to it is still there.
One engine, two uses
Built for students first. Open to your team as well.
One block editor and one multi-page site structure underneath. The primary job is giving students a free space to author, held in institutional custody. The same engine also lets your central teams build a resource once and reuse it, with no separate system to learn.
For students
At institutional scale
A free space to build, attached to the assignment.
The academic attaches Quyer to a Canvas assignment in a couple of steps. The student gets a free-form, multi-page space and builds a visually rich artefact, choosing their own structure, media and shape.
- Every version saved and visible to the marker
- Locks at the due date, tied to the assignment
- Simple for students, a couple of steps for the academic
For your team
Learning designers and central teams
Build once, embed anywhere.
A learning, teaching or assessment resource authored in one place and embedded across as many courses and sites as need it. Its own content editor, easy to use, nothing to configure. Update it at the source and it updates everywhere it appears.
- Self-serve, no procurement, no configuration
- One source of truth instead of a rebuild each time
Fraunces Black · WONK axis on
The name
Quire, historically quyer.
A quire is a folded gathering of leaves, a section of a manuscript, later bound together to form a complete codex. Pages, authored and then bound into a permanent record.
The student authors the leaves freely. The institution binds and holds the codex. Both halves of the positioning, carried in one word.
The tail on that Q is a real alternate glyph rather than a drawn flourish, which is why the mark carries itself and why there is no full stop after it.
Early access
Quyer is being built now.
It came out of a problem a university named itself: a space where students build freely and the institution keeps the record. The early conversations are shaping the rest of it. Tell us how you'd use it and we'll be in touch as places open.
Register interest