The Learning Management System (LMS) has become the default container for digital education—structured, institutional, and increasingly corporate. But as many educators know, these platforms often constrain more than they enable. Their assumptions—about hierarchy, control, and surveillance—are baked into the architecture. What would it look like to build an online learning environment that begins with different values?

OpenLearn Commons is my attempt to answer that question.

It is a modular, open-source platform for online learning—built from federated, non-corporate tools. Instead of centralised control, it offers interoperability. Instead of surveillance, it honours privacy. And instead of one-size-fits-all content delivery, it enables learner agency, co-creation, and open practice.

OpenLearn Commons is not a single platform but an assemblage of purpose-built services, each part of the Fediverse or otherwise open and extensible:

• Mastodon for announcements and course discussion
• WriteFreely for student journals and reflective writing
• Lemmy for topic-based conversation and community Q&A
• PeerTube for lectures and student video projects
• Nextcloud for file sharing and collaborative editing
• Grav CMS for publishing modular course content in Markdown
• Keycloak for single sign-on and identity management

These tools are integrated using open standards like ActivityPub and OAuth2, with Grav CMS providing a unifying front-end that links services into a pedagogically coherent experience.

Too much educational technology replicates the logic of surveillance capitalism: extract data, centralise control, and scale delivery. OpenLearn Commons is an effort to build something different—an environment where:

• Learners can create, share, and reflect in public or private spaces
• Educators can publish open course materials without platform lock-in
• Communities of learning can emerge across institutional and national boundaries
• Infrastructure aligns with the values of the digital commons

The platform is being built to support open educational practice, critical pedagogy, and self-hosted teaching in low-resource or decentralised contexts.

All components of OpenLearn Commons are free/libre open-source software. But the project is also committed to:

• Publishing all content and configuration under open licenses (CC BY-SA, AGPL)
• Enabling educators to remix, redeploy, or fork the platform
• Prioritising transparency and user sovereignty over automation and metrics

This is openness as educational practice—not just code availability.

I’m currently building and documenting a working prototype, supported by an application to the NLnet Commons Fund. Once the infrastructure is stable, I plan to release:

• An openly licensed deployment guide and configuration repository
• Course templates using Grav and WriteFreely
• A reference instance for demonstration and remix
• Reflections on the process, both technical and pedagogical

I’m looking for collaborators—educators, technologists, writers, and critical friends—who share an interest in reimagining digital learning infrastructure.

If you’re frustrated with your LMS, inspired by the Fediverse, or simply curious about ethical alternatives to the current platform status quo, I’d love to hear from you.

Feel free to contact me, follow the updates, or contribute ideas via the Fediverse or email.

OpenLearn Commons is an invitation to build the future of online learning as a commons—not a product.