Adapters, not platforms
Why coursekit installs into the LMS your institution already uses, instead of asking you to migrate to a new one.
The instinct, when you build a better authoring tool, is to build a platform around it. A hosted product. Accounts. A separate gradebook. A migration plan that ends with your institution running your software instead of the LMS it already runs.
We’re explicitly not doing that.
Where the work already lives
Open edX, Canvas, Moodle, D2L, Blackboard, Google Classroom — every institution running educational technology at scale runs one of these. The gradebook is there. The enrolment data is there. The single sign-on is there. The compliance reviews and the procurement approvals and the “the IT director already said yes to this vendor three years ago” — all there.
A new authoring tool that asks an institution to migrate off any of those is going to lose to the inertia of an entire procurement cycle. And it should. Migrating an LMS is enormously expensive; nobody should do it casually, and certainly not for an editor.
What an adapter is
An adapter is a thin connector between coursekit and a specific LMS. It handles three things:
- Embedding the editor inside whatever frame the LMS gives us.
- Persisting the authored document somewhere the LMS will keep it.
- Routing grades back into the LMS’s gradebook.
Authoring conventions, block types, grading behaviour — those live in the packages and are identical on every adapter. The adapter is the minimum amount of code required to make the same editor work inside a different host.
This means two things in practice. First, the editor your authors use on Open edX is the same editor they’d use on Canvas. Same shortcuts, same conventions, same correctness signals. Second, when an institution migrates LMSes (and they do, every few years), the content travels: same document format, different adapter.
What we don’t do
We don’t run anything for you. We don’t host. We don’t have a gradebook. We don’t have a quiz player that competes with your LMS’s quiz player — when a learner submits an answer, the submission goes through the LMS’s normal submission path, which means the LMS’s gradebook, the LMS’s analytics, and the LMS’s accommodations and extensions all just work, because we never interposed on them.
This is a smaller product than the one we could have built. It’s also a product that’s actually adoptable inside the institutions where the work needs to happen.
When the editor is the product
There’s a related principle here. The editor is the product. Not the authoring tool, the hosting service, the analytics dashboard, the gradebook, the question bank, and the LMS-replacement project. Just the editor. The thing the author types into.
Every block type, every keyboard shortcut, every piece of correctness feedback, every layout decision — all of those compound into either a calm surface that helps a domain expert do their work, or a noisy one that gets in the way. We’d rather spend that attention on the editor and leave the rest to the systems that already do it well.