What Is Lesson Commons?
A short answer to the question we get asked most often.
June 23, 2026 — By Brent Miller
If you are a teacher, a tutor, or a course designer, Lesson Commons gives you a way to create learning materials on your own computer — instructional content, exercises, and auto-scored quizzes — and publish them for your students to work through online at their own pace.
That is the short version. Here is a little more detail.
How it works
Lesson Commons has two parts:
The Editor is a desktop application for Windows. This is where you create your content — explanations, reading passages, images, exercises, quizzes, and full courses. Support for audio and video is in development. Everything you build is saved on your own machine in an open file format called LC-JSON. You own it. You can back it up, copy it, or move it to another computer.
Learn is the web platform where your students do the work. You upload a course, create a group, and share an access code. Students visit a web page, enter the code, and work through the material at their own pace — in class, at home, or anywhere with a browser. No app to download. No email or password required.
As a teacher, you see a progress dashboard showing who completed what, when, and how they scored. Your students get immediate feedback on their answers — not just a number, but explanations that help them understand what went wrong.
What you can create
The Editor supports eleven question types, ten of which score themselves automatically:
- Multiple choice (single or multiple correct answers, with partial credit)
- True / false
- Gap fill, word bank, and open cloze exercises
- Dropdown cloze (multiple choice within a passage)
- Short answer
- Matching
- Ordering (words, sentences, or paragraphs)
- Sentence transformation (for Cambridge exam preparation)
- Essay (teacher-graded, with a rubric)
You combine instructional content and exercises into lessons, units, and courses — whatever structure fits your material. Students work through it asynchronously, at their own speed.
What makes it different
Your content stays on your computer. It is not locked inside a platform. If you stop using Lesson Commons, your files are still yours — readable, exportable, and documented.
Students join without personal data. No email addresses, no passwords, no accounts. This is especially important if you teach minors or work under European privacy regulations.
Feedback that teaches. Every question type supports hints and per-answer feedback. The goal is not just to score students — it is to help them learn from their mistakes in the moment.
Twelve interface languages. The student and teacher interfaces are fully translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Teachers can lock a group’s interface to a specific language for immersion courses.
Settings you configure once. You set your preferences — show answers, shuffle questions, limit attempts — and they apply everywhere. Override at the course or assignment level only when you need to.
Is it just for language teachers?
No. Lesson Commons is built for publishing learning content in general — any subject where structured content, exercises, and quizzes for self-paced study are useful.
But I am a foreign language teacher with thirty years of experience, and I have made sure that language teachers have the tools they need. That includes sentence transformation questions designed for Cambridge exam preparation, ordering exercises at word, sentence, and paragraph level, cloze formats that match real exam tasks, and per-group language lock for immersion classrooms.
If you teach science, history, professional training, or anything else that benefits from structured content, exercises, and quizzes for self-paced study — the platform works for you too.
Where is it now?
Lesson Commons is in beta. The Editor and Learn are both free to use during this period. If you would like to try it, sign up at lessoncommons.com/beta.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The Editor, Learn platform, and LC-JSON open format are in active development. 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.