One Tool. Two Ways to Work.
Some teachers build full courses. Others collect exercises one at a time. Lesson Commons now supports both — without making you choose.
April 28, 2026 — By Brent Miller
Most authoring tools have an opinion about how you should work. Some expect you to start with a syllabus and build downward — units, lessons, activities. Others expect you to make individual exercises and figure out the structure later. Most are right about one approach and wrong about the other. So roughly half the teachers who try them feel like they are fighting the tool.
This week we finished a set of features in Lesson Commons that supports both ways of working — in the same Editor, with the same file format, and the same options for export and delivery.
Two kinds of teacher
I am the first kind. When I sit down to make materials, I think in courses. I want a structured file — units, lessons, instructional content, practice activities, revision exercises — that I can upload to Learn at the start of a term and let students work through at their own pace. The course is the product.
But I also want to take individual questions out of that course. Maybe I want to send ten matching exercises to Kahoot for a warm-up. Maybe I want to package six sentence transformations as a short revision quiz. The course comes first; the smaller pieces come later.
Other teachers work the opposite way. They start with a stack of questions: ten gap-fills for Monday’s class, twelve MCQs from last week’s vocabulary review, eight matching items on functional language. They use each set as a quick practice activity. No course structure. Just exercises.
But over time, those sets accumulate. By December, a teacher might have twelve exercises covering past tenses. She combines them into a revision lesson. The next year, she adds another lesson. Eventually, without planning to, she has a full course — built from the bottom up, one set at a time.
Both ways are legitimate. Both produce good materials. Until now, most tools only handled one of them well.
What we built
The Editor now has four small additions that, together, support both workflows.
A Basket. As you browse your questions in Lesson Commons Editor (the desktop app), you can right-click any question and add it to a basket — a temporary workspace, like a clipboard. Save the basket if you want to come back later, or empty it when you are done.
A Question Bank. Every teacher has a personal collection of loose questions — questions that don’t belong to a specific course yet. Maybe you wrote them as standalone practice; maybe you pulled them from an old course. Either way, they live in your bank, searchable by content, tag, type, or difficulty.
Search your whole library. Before, finding a specific question meant remembering which course it was in, opening that file, and looking inside. If you had ten course files, you might open all ten. Now you can search across everything at once — all your courses, the loose questions in your bank, and your saved Question Sets. You can search by content, by tag, by question type, or by difficulty, and the results appear together in one list.
Question Sets. Once you have a basket of questions you like, one click turns it into a Question Set: a small, self-contained bundle with its own title and tags. You can edit it, export it, or upload it to Learn — and when students open it, they see a clean list of exercises, not an empty course.
That last part matters. A Question Set should feel like a focused practice activity, not a course with most of the chapters missing.
Why this matters
These features remove a decision that I don’t think teachers should have to make: am I building a course, or a quiz?
The answer is: you are building materials. How you organise them — and how you deploy them — is up to you, and it can change over time.
You can start with a full course and pull questions out for quick practice. Or you can start with one set, then another, and let the structure grow on its own. Either way, the format is the same. The scoring is the same. The feedback is the same. The export options are the same.
One tool. Two ways to work. And the freedom to change your mind.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The Editor, the Learn platform, and the LC.JSON open format are in active development. You can follow our updates at lessoncommons.com/news.
This article was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The author defined the purpose, audience, and main ideas, directed the editorial approach, and edited the final text.