Author once. Teach everywhere.
How Learning Tapestry built the open-source curriculum authoring and publishing engine that transformed access to EngageNY into a dynamic platform and then turned the engine into reusable infrastructure, serving three organizations, 13 million students across 45 states, and growing.
The Problem: Forty-Five Million Downloads and Nowhere to Go
In 2012, the state of New York did something unprecedented. Using $700 million in Race to the Top funding, the state education department built a complete set of Common Core-aligned curriculum units for every grade in math and ELA and published them online for free. They called it EngageNY.
By 2016, EngageNY had been downloaded more than 45 million times. Surveys found that 44% of elementary math teachers in Common Core states were using the materials. It was, by any measure, the most successful open educational resource in American history.
But EngageNY was a website, not a platform. Built on Drupal, it was a static repository of downloadable files, PDFs, Word documents, and slide decks that teachers could grab but couldn’t search effectively and couldn’t adapt easily. When federal funding ended, the team behind EngageNY saw both a crisis and an opportunity: the content existed, and 45 million downloads proved the demand. Now it needed a system to maintain, improve, and distribute it.
By summer 2015, Laura Smith, formerly at the New York State Education Department, and Kate Gerson founded UnboundEd with a mission to make high-quality curriculum free and accessible to every teacher in America.
They needed a technology partner who understood both education and infrastructure, so they called Steve Midgley, Learning Tapestry’s founder and former Deputy Director of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. He was at the table before the organization even had a name.
The founding vision was simple: “Come for the content, and leave as a better teacher.” The technology had to make that possible.
The Solution
The first challenge was search. Teachers on the EngageNY site couldn’t find what they needed. Content was organized by module number, not by what a teacher would actually look for: a grade, a topic, a specific lesson for Tuesday’s class. In early planning sessions, the team marked content search as a “huge, huge, huge priority.”
The second challenge was structure. EngageNY’s curriculum spanned two subjects, every grade level, and thousands of individual resources organized in overlapping hierarchies. ELA had different structures for K–2 and 3–12, and math had its own patterns. Every level had downloadable materials in multiple formats, and a teacher needed to navigate from a grade and subject down to a specific lesson, see what resources were available, and get exactly the format they needed.
The third challenge was the one that continues to define Learning Tapestry’s contribution to K-12 curriculum: author once, publish anywhere. Teachers need access to curriculum in many different forms, especially now that learning can happen in person or remotely. Curriculum needs to be authored in one place as a single source of truth and published in multiple different delivery formats: Google Docs, PDFs, learning management systems, print.
LT built the Learning Content Management System (LCMS): a custom Rails application with PostgreSQL for storage, Elasticsearch for the search that teachers desperately needed, and Redis for caching and background processing. The architecture separated the curriculum content from its delivery: curriculum pieces were stored as structured data, not as formatted documents, enabling the same lesson to be delivered in any output format.
The Impact
By 2018, the LCMS that Learning Tapestry built for UnboundEd had proven itself. Thousands of teachers were using lessons.unbounded.org to find, download, and teach with high-quality curriculum. The system worked. But something more important was happening behind the scenes.
Other curriculum organizations like OpenSciEd for science and Odell Education for ELA needed the same capability: author curriculum once, publish it to any format, make it searchable and accessible to teachers. They didn’t need UnboundEd’s specific content. They needed the engine underneath it.
So Learning Tapestry extracted the common architecture from the UnboundEd codebase and created a reusable Rails engine that could support authoring and publishing any curriculum. While Learning Tapestry maintains the infrastructure, three organizations and counting build on it. What started as one organization’s platform became shared infrastructure for the K-12 curriculum authoring and publishing ecosystem.
Curriculum content is stored as structured data, not formatted documents. The same lesson renders as a Google Doc, a PDF, inside an LMS, or a printable handout, all from a single source of truth.
Extracted from the UnboundEd codebase into a reusable Rails engine, which serves multiple curriculum organizations from a unified codebase.
The entire stack is Apache 2.0 licensed. unbounded-lcms, lcms-engine, and lcms-core are all on GitHub. This is public curriculum infrastructure for public education.
A Decade of Partnership
The LCMS is the headline, but the UnboundEd engagement has never been a single project. It’s a decade of embedded partnership, with Learning Tapestry as the technology team that stays, adapts, and keeps building as the organization evolves.
Over the last decade, UnboundEd itself has grown into something its founders could barely have imagined in 2015. After the 2022 merger with Pivot Learning and CORE Learning, the organization now partners with 852 schools, districts, and education agencies across 45 states, supporting over 13 million students. The Standards Institute, where educators learn GLEAM (Grade-Level, Engaging, Affirming, and Meaningful) instruction, has held 19 sessions and trained thousands of educators. The curriculum on lessons.unbounded.org is still free, open, and running on the infrastructure that Learning Tapestry built. It hosts more than 5,000 lessons, modules, and units. This is what happens when a technology partner doesn’t just deliver a project and leave.
Learning Tapestry is a key partner for our work. They help us design, build, and support the technology that drives our work in content and curriculum.
Laura Smith, COO & Co-Founder, UnboundEd
References
- New York State Education Department, EngageNY.org, curriculum download statistics.
- RAND Corporation, “Implementation of K–12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts,” 2016.
- UnboundEd, “UnboundEd Celebrates 10 Years of Nationwide Classroom Impact,” 2025.
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