About EduPLN · Est. 2009
The teacher-founded educator community that has been running on practitioner trust since 2009.
Before "PLN" was a hashtag, a high-school history teacher in Edmonton built the professional learning network she wished she had. Fifteen years later, 48,300+ educators still gather here to swap lesson plans, book peer-led PD, and get unstuck in eleven minutes flat — no publishers, no algorithms, no AI filler.
- Founded
- 2009
- Active members
- 48,300+
- Lesson library
- 215,000+
- Countries
- 92
The founder story
A classroom teacher built the PLN she wished she'd had. It's still run that way.
In 2009, Lisa Spahic was teaching high-school history in Edmonton and spending her Sunday nights emailing other teachers across Alberta, asking if anyone had a better way to teach the War of 1812. The inbox worked — barely. So she built what came next.
EduPLN launched as a Ning group that fall, with a simple rule: only practicing educators could post, lesson contributions were peer-reviewed, and the community owned its own data. Fifteen years and 48,300+ members later, those three rules still govern everything on the platform.
Today Lisa leads a 14-person team out of Boston, supported by a 22-person educator advisory board made up of classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and district PD leads. Lesson contributions are CC-BY licensed. Member data is never sold to third-party advertisers. The codebase is open source. None of that is a marketing line — it's the founding contract, still honored.
- 01Practitioner-owned. No publishers, no pay-to-feature placements, no sponsored lesson plans.
- 02Peer-reviewed. Every resource in the library is vetted by a working educator before it goes public.
- 03Educator data stays educator-owned. CC-BY contributions, no third-party ad sales, ever.
15 years, dated
Fifteen years of community-defining moments, each one documented.
EduPLN has stayed independent by earning the same trust from educators, year after year. Here is the public record.
-
2009
Founded in Edmonton by a classroom teacher.
Lisa Spahic launches EduPLN as a Ning group for K-12 educators. The first rule: only practicing teachers can post. The second: lesson contributions are peer-reviewed. Both rules still hold.
-
2016
Replaces Ning with EduPLN OSS.
The community migrates to a custom open-source platform. The codebase is released publicly as EduPLN OSS and is now used by 180+ school networks worldwide to run their own practitioner communities.
-
2017
EdSurge Concierge Award for community impact.
EduPLN receives the EdSurge Concierge Award in recognition of sustained, practitioner-led impact on the K-12 educator community — at a moment when most educator networks were being acquired by publishers.
-
2019 · 2021 · 2023
Named a Top 10 Educator Network by EdTech Magazine — three times.
EdTech Magazine lists EduPLN among the top 10 educator networks in 2019, 2021, and 2023. The same period brings PD cohort partnerships with ISTE (official Community Ning migration), ASCD, NAIS, and 14 state education associations.
Who actually runs EduPLN
Fourteen staff. Twenty-two classroom advisors. Zero publishers in the chain of command.
EduPLN is small on purpose. Our full-time team is organized into the four working groups below — every one of them reports back to the educator advisory board that governs content policy, licensing, and member-data commitments.
-
Working Group 01
Community & Forum Operations
Four full-time community leads moderate the #TeachChat forums, archive the weekly Twitter chats, and keep the 11-minute average response time honest. Two former K-12 teachers, one school librarian, one instructional coach.
- 4 staff
- 6 advisors
-
Working Group 02
Library Curation & Peer Review
Three full-time librarian-editors tag, standards-map, and review every lesson before it ships to the 215,000+ resource library. Every submission is read by a human reviewer with classroom experience — never an algorithm, never an LLM.
- 3 staff
- 7 advisors
-
Working Group 03
Engineering & EduPLN OSS
Five full-time engineers maintain the open-source platform that replaced Ning in 2016 and now powers 180+ school networks worldwide. The codebase is released as EduPLN OSS under a permissive license — the same one that runs this site.
- 5 staff
- 4 advisors
-
Working Group 04
PD Cohorts & District Partnerships
Two full-time PD coordinators book the cohorts we run with ASCD, NAIS, and 14 state education associations, and steward the 340+ district site-wide seat contracts. Backed by five advisors who design each cohort's facilitation arc.
- 2 staff
- 5 advisors
The full educator advisory board — 22 practicing teachers, coaches, and district leads — meets quarterly to ratify content policy, CC-BY licensing terms, and member-data commitments. Board members serve two-year rotating terms and are nominated by the membership.
A note from the founder
Three commitments we will not bend on.
I started EduPLN in 2009 from my history classroom in Edmonton because I wanted one place on the open web where teachers could find a vetted lesson on Monday morning and ask a real peer for help by Monday lunch. Sixteen years later, those two things are still the entire job. — Lisa Spahic, Founder
-
1. Educator-owned data.
Your drafts, your bookmarks, your forum history, your PD cohort notes — they belong to you, stored in a model you can export in full at any time. We do not sell, rent, or share member data with third-party advertisers. We never have, and our Delaware C-corp bylaws require an annual public reaffirmation.
-
2. CC-BY on every contribution.
Every lesson plan, unit, and resource in the 215,000+ library is contributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Authors are credited on every download page. If you remix a colleague's lesson and publish the result, the attribution travels with it — that's the deal.
-
3. Human peer review. Nothing else.
No AI-generated lesson plans. No auto-generated quizzes. Every resource in the library is read by a human reviewer with classroom experience, and our forum response time is still measured in minutes, not hours, because a teacher answered the question — not a model.
Lisa Spahic, Founder
EduPLN, Inc. · 221 Devonshire Street, Floor 4, Boston, MA 02109
[email protected] · +1 (617) 555-0142
Awards & institutional partnerships
The recognition that put us in the same room as the associations we serve.
EduPLN is independent — a practitioner-run C-corp, not a nonprofit, not a publisher subsidiary. The awards below and the named program partnerships that follow are the third-party signal that the model holds up at scale.
-
Award · 2017
EdSurge Concierge Award for Community Impact
Recognized by EdSurge in 2017 for sustained community impact across the K-12 educator network — cited specifically for the searchable #TeachChat archive and the practitioner-led moderation model.
-
Recognition · 2019 · 2021 · 2023
EdTech Magazine "Top 10 Educator Network" — three times
Named to EdTech Magazine's annual Top 10 Educator Network list in 2019, 2021, and 2023. The recurring recognition tracks the platform's growth from 32,000 members in 2019 to 48,300+ active educators today.
-
Featured · U.S. Department of Education
EdTech Evidence Exchange — model practitioner community
Featured by the U.S. Department of Education's EdTech Evidence Exchange as a model practitioner community for educator-led peer review and open CC-BY resource sharing across district networks.
-
Program partnerships
ISTE, ASCD, NAIS & 14 state education associations
Powering ISTE's official Community Ning migration, hosting PD cohorts for ASCD and NAIS, and running sustained programs with 14 state education associations. 340+ districts have purchased site-wide seats for curriculum sharing and PD.
Ready to join the network that 48,300+ educators call home?
Join the Network — Free for Educators