The problem was not content
Oak National Academy already publishes a national curriculum as lessons: video, slides, quizzes, transcripts. The licence is open. The API is not something I scraped or guessed at. I wrote to Oak’s developers, asked for access, and they sent me a token. That token is for my family. The live hub is not a public school.
What is not there is a week. A parent still has to decide which units belong in September, which child is on which year, and whether Tuesday’s history actually happened. That work usually lives in a spreadsheet, a browser history, and a conversation at the kitchen table.
I did not want to build another lesson library. I wanted a hub.
What the hub does
HomeSchool Hub is a Rails app with two roles.
A parent creates an account, invites a child by email, picks school years, and assigns Oak units to the months of the academic year. That is the plan: September to July, one subject at a time, not an infinite catalogue.
A child signs in and sees this month’s work. Lessons render in the hub. Quizzes score in the hub. Completions, time on a lesson, and sections viewed stay on the child’s account. The parent opens Insights and can filter by child.
When a child has finished enough lessons in one subject, the parent can generate a checkpoint test: a longer paper, 40 to 50 questions, with a separate answer key. That is not gamification. It is a way to ask whether the month stuck.
Why wrap Oak instead of linking out
The first version of the plan was an iframe. Put the Oak URL in a frame, call it a product, move on. That fails as soon as you care about progress. You cannot mark a lesson complete if you never saw the quiz. You cannot tell a parent how long a child spent if the child left your site.
So the hub syncs Oak’s Open API, then hydrates each lesson: summary, assets, quiz, transcript. The child stays in one place. Oak remains the source. The hub is not affiliated with Oak. It is a family interface on top of a public curriculum.
That distinction matters. The experiment is the interface, not the content. The live site is for us. If you want to run a copy, the landing page has the steps. Reach out to Oak for your own token. They will give you one too.
What I am still testing
Families do not fail because a badge is missing. They fail because the week has no shape. The calendar, the monthly plan, and Insights are the real product. Themes and streaks are easy to add and easy to regret.
The live test is whether a parent can set the year up once, then check in without becoming a full-time administrator. If that works, the hub is useful. If the parent still needs a spreadsheet, I built a prettier second job.
The site is at homeschool.peponi.to. The source is public.
Related
- A school day that stays at home — Why the hub exists, and how the week and lesson path are designed for one learner
- HomeSchool Hub experiment — Status, source, and what shipped