Follow our journey as we build a teacher-first platform designed to protect your time, your materials, and your students' privacy.
2025 was the year Lesson Commons™ took shape. Most of the work went into solving the hard problems first — the ones that make a long-lasting educational tool possible. While the visual interfaces are still in development, the underlying engine is already powerful, stable, and designed to last for decades.
All of this work is invisible to most users — but without it, Lesson Commons™ could never be a safe, future-proof library for teachers.
After a year of building foundations, 2026 has been all about turning the engine into something teachers and students can actually use. The first quarter alone delivered more visible progress than the whole of 2025.
Our first public beta milestone. Here's what shipped:
This release represents 37 shipped features across 6 weeks of intensive development. The platform is now in closed beta with a small group of testers.
The Matching question type is now fully implemented across the Editor and Learn. Students select matching pairs from dropdowns, with immediate scoring and optional feedback. More interaction styles (drag-and-drop, media-rich prompts) are planned for future releases. This brings the total number of supported question types to ten — covering everything from multiple choice to sentence transformation. For a deeper look at how we approach question type design, see Ordering Type Questions: The Question Type Nobody Gets Right.
We published a complete set of bilingual help guides (English and Spanish) at learn.lessoncommons.com/Help. Five guides cover the Editor Quick Start, Teacher Quick Start, Monitoring Progress, Settings & Customization, and Your Content, Your Computer. All guides are accessible from the teacher menu and from the marketing site — no login required.
LC Learn now supports twelve interface languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Every page, message, legal document, and help guide is fully translated.
The headline feature is per-group language lock — teachers can lock a group's interface to a specific language for full immersion, while other groups see their browser's language or their own preference. A pre-consent bypass ensures students always see the privacy notice in their own language before the lock takes effect. We wrote about the design decisions behind this feature in Your Interface, Their Language.
The Editor now supports two complete authoring workflows: build a full course and extract questions for reuse, or start with individual question sets and grow them into courses over time. New features include a selection basket for collecting questions as you browse, a personal Question Bank for loose questions, cross-library search, and one-click Question Set packaging for focused delivery in LC Learn. Read more in One Tool. Two Ways to Work.
A new essay on how teaching materials get lost — in folders, on old laptops, and across platforms that come and go — and why an open, documented file format is the only durable fix. The formal LC-JSON specification and JSON Schemas will be published on lc-json.org by May 30, 2026. Read Eighty Questions. Somewhere.
We've published our privacy and data-protection design notes in a new documentation section — adapted from the internal architecture records we actually build from. They cover the principles behind the platform, exactly what student activity we collect and what we refuse to (and why IP addresses are hashed and purged after 90 days), and how data subject rights — access, export, and deletion — work as shipping features rather than policy promises. The accompanying essay explains why we built to the GDPR first, and why so few vendors write any of this down. Read Designing for GDPR From Day One.
The LC-JSON (Learning Content JSON) v1.0 release candidate is live at lc-json.org, with the JSON Schemas, conformance corpus, and reference validator all public. The source repository is at github.com/lc-json/specification. LC-JSON is an independent open specification published under Apache 2.0; Lesson Commons is its first and reference implementation. The v1.0 release is targeted for the end of June.
With LC-JSON now at its first public release candidate and the EdTech standards community gathered at 1EdTech's conference, we've made the Lesson Commons Editor a conforming LC-JSON consumer, not just a producer. It now preserves the parts of a file it doesn't understand — fields from future versions of the format, other vendors' extensions, and question types it can't yet render — and hands them back untouched on export. Read Preserve What You Don't Understand.
Lesson Commons™ is built to allow anonymous access codes for minors and minimal data storage. Teachers and schools stay in control of what personal data gets collected — or not collected.
We believe teachers should never again lose years of work because a platform shuts down or changes format. Content created with Lesson Commons™ is always exportable, always readable, and always yours.
We know the reality: most teachers are underpaid and overworked. Lesson Commons™ will always have fair pricing and meaningful discounts for teachers in underserved or developing regions, NGOs, and low-income educational contexts.
Lesson Commons™ is designed for teachers who put real thought into their materials — clear explanations, rich feedback, well-tagged items that can be found again years from now. If you invest a couple of hours building a lesson properly, that lesson can be polished with use, remixed into new courses, and delivered to hundreds or thousands of students over the years ahead. This is not a quick-fix tool. It is a long-term library for teachers who take their craft seriously.
Content created with Lesson Commons™ is tagged, structured, and designed for clarity — which means it also works beautifully with AI tools when you choose to use them. But the starting point is always your expertise, not a generated draft. We believe the best teaching materials come from teachers, not from algorithms.
Every teacher knows someone who has lost years of worksheets, activities or exam tasks because a platform changed, closed, or simply stopped supporting old exports.
Exam prep teachers (especially in TEFL/ESL) face this constantly: materials built in one system cannot be transferred to another, so they end up manually rebuilding everything again and again.
Lesson Commons™ fixes this by giving teachers:
The result: materials that survive, adapt, and improve over time — not disappear.
With the v0.9 beta underway, the rest of 2026 will focus on:
These features will roll out gradually, shaped by feedback from our beta testers.
Want to see it in action?
Join the Beta — get early access, help shape the platform, and see it for yourself.
If you're a teacher, tutor, academic manager, or NGO educator and want early access to Lesson Commons™, we'd love to include you in the beta group.
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