Is CuraCourse an LMS?

People ask me this a lot, usually right after a demo. The short answer is yes. You can run a whole course on CuraCourse without Canvas, Moodle, or anything else. Students join with a class code, you assign work with due dates, and grades land in a gradebook you can export.

The longer answer is the one I care about. I taught computer science for more than 15 years, from high school to college, and I used a lot of LMSs along the way. They were good at organizing a course. They were never where the learning happened. CuraCourse is our attempt to fix that.

What an LMS does well

An LMS is a filing system for a course. It holds the roster, the calendar, the assignment list, and the gradebook. It sends reminders and keeps the records a school needs. That work matters, and most LMSs do it well.

Now look at what’s inside the folders. A PDF of last year’s slides. A link to a publisher’s homework site. A YouTube video. A Google Doc of lab instructions. A link to a separate autograder. The LMS knows where everything is, but almost everything students learn from was made somewhere else.

Content creation was always the missing piece

Every LMS has a page editor, and in my experience almost nobody teaches from it. It’s a rich-text box. You can’t put a question in the middle of an explanation and have it check the answer. You can’t run code in it. You can’t type an equation and have students answer in math. So teachers do what I did for years: build the real material in other tools, then upload it or link to it.

That’s how a course turns into a pile of attachments. Students click out to four or five sites a week, each with its own login and its own idea of what a grade is. The teacher becomes the glue, copying scores from one place to another on Sunday night.

I think the editor should have been the center of the LMS from the start. Making and fixing course materials is where teachers spend most of their time, so that’s where the tool should be at its best.

Learning materials that live in the platform

In CuraCourse, the lesson is what you build, and you build it in CuraCourse. You write an explanation the way you’d say it in class, type /, and add a question right below it. The things that used to live on other sites are blocks you drop into the same page:

• Questions: multiple choice, multiple select, fill-in-the-blank, open response, categorization, and ordering, which doubles as a Parsons problem.
• Code that students write and run in the lesson, checked by tests you set, plus cloud labs with VS Code in the browser for bigger projects.
• Math typed in LaTeX, answered on a math keyboard, and checked for equivalent answers.
• Graphs and geometric constructions that students draw and that get checked against your answers.
• Custom simulations in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which CuraCourse Assistant can draft for you.

Because it’s all in one place, it all works together. The rubric that grades an answer is the same one students check their work against before they submit. Fix a typo in a lesson and every section sees the fix, with nothing to re-upload.

You also don’t have to write every word yourself. The CuraCourse Library has shared courses, like CSAwesome for AP CS A, that you can adopt and change. Your copy stays linked to the original, so the author’s updates show up in your course.

Interactive by default

Most course materials are read-only. A student reads a chapter, then goes somewhere else to find out whether they understood it, and gets a score back days later.

I wanted the opposite. In a CuraCourse lesson, students do something every few paragraphs: answer, run, predict, draw. Check Answer tells them whether they’ve got it before anything is submitted, so they fix mistakes while the idea is still fresh. The reading is the practice.

It changes what you see as a teacher, too. When the practice lives in the lesson, you can see where each student got stuck, down to the question and the paragraph above it. A quiz score at the end of the week can’t tell you that.

AI that works from your course

Most AI in education sits next to the course, in a chat window that knows nothing about what you taught. Because CuraCourse holds the material, its AI can work from it.

CuraCourse Tutor reads the lesson a student is on, so it explains things your way, in your notation and your order. It’s off until you turn it on, it’s never available during exams, and you can read every conversation. CuraCourse Assistant helps you write and edit lessons, and tracked changes show you what it changed before you publish.

The LMS parts are there too

None of this means giving up the basics. Without another LMS, CuraCourse gives you:

• A roster students join with a class code.
• Assignments that bundle lessons with a due date, and access settings that decide what’s visible, locked, or graded.
• Group work for team projects.
• Exams with time limits, passwords, and attempt limits.
• A gradebook with every lesson, lab, and exam, student by student, that you can export as a CSV.

Some pieces are still on the way. We’re building discussions and attendance now. If your course depends on those today, or your school requires a particular LMS, keep it and run CuraCourse inside it.

Already have an LMS? Keep it

Plenty of schools have to use Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace, or Schoology, and that’s fine. CuraCourse connects to all of them through LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS without a new login, and grades sync back to your gradebook.

Let the LMS keep the records. Let CuraCourse be where the course lives.

So, is it an LMS?

Yes, if you want it to be. I’d rather you think of it as the part LMSs left out: a place to build the course itself, where every page is interactive and everything students do is graded in the same spot.

Build one lesson, try it with your class, and decide from there. It’s free to build, and students pay $0, $20, or $45 per course, or the school pays.