Eighty Questions. Somewhere.
How teaching materials get lost even before any platform gets involved.
May 5, 2026 — By Brent Miller
Somewhere on one of my backup hard drives — the ones with copies from three different computers, including my work machine from the 2010s — there is a Word document with eighty-odd upper-intermediate Cambridge paraphrase questions. Sentence transformations I wrote, tested with students, corrected, and rewrote over several years.
I know the file exists, but I still can’t find it. I made more than one version, from a series of edits across different school years. I also wrote a lot of derived questions for follow-up quizzes. Only two of those survived, both as PDFs. At some point — probably in 2023 — I updated the main set in .docx, but that version appears to be lost. I may have left it on my old work computer, or on Google Docs under my old school account. The only copy I have of that revision is a photocopy, with some highlighted typos that I apparently never got around to fixing.
None of this was carelessness. Teachers have demanding jobs. We are pinched for time, mentally fatigued by the end of the day, and distracted by the next class, the next parent meeting, the next set of reports. File naming, organisation, and backup are lower priorities. Not because we do not care about our carefully crafted materials, but because we are spending our energy on the students in front of us.
The result is that the learning content we author — the sequencing, the careful explanations, and the well-chosen distractors that actually teach something — gets scattered across folders, drives, and file formats until pieces of it quietly disappear.
And that is before any technology gets involved…
Then the platforms
In 2016 I put a selection of those questions into Moodle. I built lessons and quizzes, spent weekends formatting them and authoring helpful feedback, and learned that the quiz engine did not score paraphrase questions as cleanly as I hoped. Then the school IT department purged old data. I spent a few hours figuring out how to make a backup Moodle course file. I have not found it. In any case, the school eventually dropped Moodle so a backup would be useless.
When Kahoot became popular, I transcribed a paper version of my questions again, adapting them to the multiple choice format with three distractors. It turned out that Kahoot is not the right tool for my heady exam content. My weaker teenagers were joining with answer-cheat apps or zoning out because they had no way to get on the leader board. Another set of evenings gone.
Then a colleague gave a seminar on Wordwall, and the school signed up for a year. I rebuilt a subset of the same questions yet again. Students were keen for a few weeks — change of routine — and then it became a filler activity. My user name was my email at my old school… More hours sunk into the same content, in a format that I can no longer use.
The teachers who never started
I know colleagues who watched this happen and decided it was not worth the trouble. They stick to photocopies. They have seen technologies come and go, and they are not willing to waste another weekend on something that will be obsolete within two years.
If they teach online, they manage folders of PDFs and distribute them however they can. My own Italian teacher emails a PDF before class. I complete it on paper, scan it, and email it back. It works. It is also completely manual.
These teachers are not wrong to be sceptical. They have just never been offered a format that lasts.
What an open file format actually solves
LC-JSON is the file format behind Lesson Commons. You can import it into the Lesson Commons Editor, where all your questions, exercises, feedback, scoring rules, tags, and course structure live in a single file on your computer. You can use LC-JSON exports to back up specific content, hand it to a colleague, move it to another machine, or upload it to Lesson Commons Learn.
The file is plain text. You would not normally read it directly — you would use the Editor or another tool that speaks LC-JSON. But the point is: the content is not locked inside a proprietary database. You can export it into a documented file format. If you opened it in Notepad, you would see your questions, your feedback, and your scoring rules in plain English.
Because I designed it specifically to be understandable to teachers.
It is not tied to a platform. If you put your eighty sentence transformations into LC-JSON today, they will still be readable in ten years regardless of what happens to Lesson Commons, Moodle, Kahoot, Wordwall, or whatever comes next.
Our formal specification and JSON Schemas will be published on lc-json.org by May 30th.
The photocopier teachers are right about one thing: your materials should not depend on a platform staying in business. They should depend on a format that is open, documented, and yours.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The Editor, Learn platform, and LC-JSON are in active development. Format specification: lc-json.org (publishing May 30, 2026). Follow 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.