Non-profit organisation, Learning Commons, has launched an open platform for educators and edtech developers today, alongside six new partner organisations. The organisation, backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in a statement on its official website, said the platform represents one of the most ambitious attempts by a single organisation to solve a major edtech headache: easily accessing and incorporating state academic standards and proven teaching methods into edtech products and services. Developers and educators say incorporating evidence-based materials and data into edtech tools is time-consuming, costly and prone to error. By offering free datasets, curricula and evaluation tools from states and many respected industry providers, the initiative helps developers and K-12 schools create evidence-based materials and assessments aligned with state standards.
The datasets include academic standards from all 50 states, breakdowns of concepts and foundational skills underlying specific standards, learning progressions mapping prerequisite and successor skills as well as curricula and course materials from prominent providers. In addition to the open platform, Learning Commons announced integration partnerships with Canva Education, Level, MagicSchool, OKO Labs, Really Great Reading and TalkingPoints. “What I’m really excited about is the number of partners we’ve been able to collaborate with. It’s not just our work — it really feels like the beginning, or maybe the beginning of the beginning,” said president of Learning Commons, Sandra Liu Huang.
According to Huang, Learning Commons has more than 70 partners contributing datasets or integrating its tools, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Since its launch in 2025, Learning Commons’ datasets have been downloaded approximately 20,000 times. “That foundation didn’t exist before in an open way, and now it does. I think it sparks people’s imagination: ‘Now I can connect this to curriculum and standards and map it to my context’ — to do things that weren’t quite so doable in the past,”
Huang said. The platform arrives as lawmakers, educators and parents push to ensure edtech offers evidence and outcomes to support its claims. Educators and industry observers believe the platform could help scale evidence-based research and high-quality instructional materials. “Trying to make sense of messy, scattered state standards and academic research is exhausting.
“Someone has to do the heavy lifting of turning all that data into clean, machine-readable formats. If a well-funded philanthropy steps up to build these foundational tools openly, it saves cash-strapped school districts and small developers from reinventing the wheel ultimately making AI in the classroom safer and higher quality for everyone,” said Tambra Clark, technology integration facilitator for Birmingham City Schools in Alabama A consultant and former Los Angeles County teacher of the year who specializes in helping educators use AI, Michael Hernandez expressed delight with the idea of surfacing and vetting high-quality resources and best practices in one place. “There are many respected institutions that offer similar services for science, medicine, and the arts, so I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for education,” he said. Helen Crompton, executive director of the Research Institute of Digital Innovation in Learning at Old Dominion University, is “cautiously optimistic” about the platform.
“One of the problems we have in education is that excellent research and evidence-based practices often do not make their way into the The Evaluators measure whether AIgenerated content created by schools and vendors is accurate, grade-appropriate, evidence-based and adheres to state academic standards. technologies educators actually use. If Learning Commons can help bridge that gap, that could be very beneficial,” she said. The platform consists of two main components: the Knowledge Graph and Evaluators. The Knowledge Graph offers K-12 education data published on GitHub under an open license, including state academic standards, learning progressions, curricula and durable skills that can integrate into AI tools.
The Evaluators measure whether AI-generated content created by schools and vendors is accurate, grade-appropriate, evidence-based and adheres to state academic standards. A third component, Agent Skills, are designed to designed to support teacher planning. Four skills are already available, and additional skills will go live later this year. Chief executive officer of Really Great Reading, Karl Rectanus said the company used the Knowledge Graph as it developed its new Literacy Outcome System, incorporating documented learning science, evidence, existing standards and progressions, rather than stitching data together from a range of sources.
He says it would have taken months for his organization to build its own infrastructure and devote resources to ongoing maintenance. “We’ve tested [the Knowledge Graph] and integrated it. It lets us move faster, together with like-minded organizations, in ways that reflect what educators already know is right — while helping the broader sector succeed, not just us,” he said. The platform could greatly help vendors as the trend toward outcomes-based contracts grows, says Lawrence Holt, co-founder of OKO Labs and an adviser to Learning Commons.
“A developer can use Learning Commons and find out whether generated material is on grade level and on standard before a student sees it, rather than discovering the problem later, when 40 percent of the fee is riding on the result,” he added. Eedi, an 11-year-old company that researches why students struggle to learn math, contributed its data to the platform. “Partnering with Learning Commons goes straight to Eedi’s mission, which is to reach a billion kids by 2030. We’re a company of about 40 people, so partnering makes sense for us,” said Eedi’s president and chief growth officer, George Mu.
Mu explained that before ChatGPT arrived, it was hard for anyone to use something so structured, descriptive and granular as its math research. “Now, with these tools from Learning Commons, teachers, students and edtech organisations can actually use it,” he said.
How One District Uses the Platform
Jason Markey, assistant superintendent of Lisle District 202 in Illinois, used the beta version of the platform to create a formative math assessment app that simulates questions students see on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness. “We just hadn’t found a provider that does math assessment that well. By connecting it to the Knowledge Graph, we can inform the reports on student progress with a lot more nuance than if we’d built it with AI alone,” Markey explained.
A teacher at Lisle Junior High School, Vincent Slowiak said the Knowledge Graph included prerequisite state standards that can flag what a student may be lacking or need reteaching on to meet a given standard. “That gives teachers another layer of information about what needs to be covered again,” he said. In addition to state standards, the Knowledge Graph includes learning materials that the Lisle district already uses. “One resource we use a lot at the elementary level, as we unpack our Common Core standards and look at instructional shifts, is Student Achievement Partners.
Seeing that inside Learning Commons was reassuring,” assistant principal of curriculum and instruction at Lisle Elementary School,” Meredith McCormick observed.
Advice from Educators
Markey and his team of educator-coders only got so far with the Knowledge Graph before they had to rely on outside help. “As [Slowiak] likes to say, ‘You can get to 97 percent pretty fast,’ but it’s hard to make something fully scalable when none of us have a computer science background. “Getting it to a point where it’s launchable — single sign-on for students, a dashboard for each teacher — is a lot more complex,” Markey admitted.
