Author once. Teach everywhere.

The Problem No One Saw

OpenSciEd had a vision that was radically simple: every science teacher in the country should be able to download a complete, research-backed, standards-aligned curriculum, for free. No paywall. No vendor lock-in. Open source, open access, open to adaptation.

World-class researchers spent years developing phenomena-based science curriculum units aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. They delivered those in 2018. The content was extraordinary. It was the kind of curriculum that changes how students think about science.

But extraordinary content doesn’t help anyone if teachers can’t access it.

The distribution problem is deceptively complex. Teachers want materials in editable formats. Administrators want them in Google Classroom or Canvas, ready to assign. Print partners need formatted PDFs.

And as was the case with OpenSciEd and every curriculum publisher, every time the curriculum is updated, which happens constantly as units are implemented in classrooms nationwide, every delivery format has to be regenerated by hand.

For a small nonprofit trying to serve tens of thousands of teachers, this was unsustainable. Each new format or platform multiplied the maintenance burden. Each revision meant touching every output channel. The content was free, but the cost of distributing it was growing faster than the organization could handle.

We had world-class curriculum sitting on a shelf. The challenge wasn’t writing it. It was getting it into the hands of every teacher who needed it, in the format they actually use.

In July 2018, OpenSciEd approached Learning Tapestry with a challenge that sat squarely in LT’s sweet spot: build a curriculum authoring and publishing system that could handle the complexity of multi-grade, multi-format content distribution, while keeping everything open source.

LT had already built the open-source Learning Content Management System (LCMS) for UnboundEd, a curriculum publisher. The LCMS was architected around a simple but powerful idea: curriculum content should be authored once and published to any delivery format (e.g., Google Docs, PDFs, learning management systems, and print), all from a single source of truth.

For OpenSciEd, this was both a technical solution and a philosophical match. Both Learning Tapestry and OpenSciEd believed that open educational resources should be truly open, not just free to access but free to adapt, remix, and redistribute. Both believed that the tools enabling that openness should themselves be open source. Both believed that technology in education should be invisible: the teacher should see the curriculum, not the infrastructure.

What began as a platform build became something more: an eight-year partnership that has evolved through every phase of OpenSciEd’s growth.

Most client stories have an ending, but this one doesn’t.

Learning Tapestry’s work with OpenSciEd began in July 2018 with the initial platform build, and eight years later, the partnership is still active, still evolving, still expanding.

The platform grew with the curriculum. When OpenSciEd completed their full middle school program in 2022, the LCMS handled it. When they expanded to high school in 2024, the system scaled. When elementary (K-5) launched in 2025 and reached full completion in March 2026, the LCMS was ready. Each expansion meant new content structures and new distribution requirements.

Along the way, LT built the tools that teachers interact with directly: the Bulk Downloader that copies a complete unit to a teacher’s Google Drive with one click. The Google Classroom Loader that turns curriculum into ready-to-assign coursework. The Canvas Loader that serves districts running Canvas LMS. Each tool is designed around one principle: remove friction between the curriculum and the teacher.

The relationship continues to grow because the work keeps delivering value, and both organizations keep seeing new opportunities to make curriculum more available to teachers.