How Kuricula licensing works
Short version: you keep your copyright. When you publish a lesson publicly, you let other teachers use and build on it — as long as they credit you and pass the same freedom along.
The license
Public lessons are licensed by their authors under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
What you keep
- Your copyright. It stays yours. Licensing isn't selling or signing anything away.
- Your name on your work. Anyone who reuses your lesson has to credit you — that's the “Attribution” half of the license.
- Your private lessons. Private means unpublished. Nothing private is licensed to anyone, ever.
- The right to use your own work anywhere else. Publishing here doesn't stop you selling it, printing it, or posting it elsewhere.
What you grant
When you mark a lesson Public, you grant everyone permission to share and adapt it — including commercially — on three conditions:
- 1Give credit. Name you, link back to the lesson, link to the license, and say if they changed anything. Every public lesson page has a ready-made credit line to copy.
- 2ShareAlike. If they build on your lesson, their version has to carry the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license. What's open stays open.
- 3No extra locks. They can't add legal terms or technical restrictions that stop the next teacher from doing the same thing.
This is irrevocable for copies already out there — that's what makes a commons a commons. You can always take a lesson private or delete it here, which stops future sharing from Kuricula, but it can't recall copies someone already made.
Adapting someone's lesson
Use the Adapt button and Kuricula handles most of this for you: your copy records where it came from, and the lesson page shows the attribution chain back to the original author automatically.
Two things are still on you: keep that credit intact, and publish your adaptation under CC BY-SA 4.0 too. If you take a lesson somewhere else — a district site, a printed packet, a slide deck — carry the credit line with it.
What this license does not cover
- Files you didn't make. A publisher's worksheet, a stock photo, a copyrighted reading passage — you can't license what you don't own, so the CC BY-SA 4.0 grant covers your own contribution only. Check attached files before you redistribute them.
- Standards text. Ohio Learning Standards, Common Core, and the like belong to the issuing state or organization. We reference them; we don't license them. Explanations teachers write about a standard are user content under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- The Kuricula name, logo, and the software itself. Those belong to PlehnLabs and aren't part of the content license.
No warranty
Lessons are shared as-is, by teachers, without warranties of any kind. Nobody — not the author, not PlehnLabs — guarantees a lesson is accurate, standards-aligned, or fit for your classroom. You're the professional in your room; use your judgment. The full legal code has the complete disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability.
This page explains the license in plain language; it isn't legal advice, and where it differs from the license text itself, the license text wins. See also our terms, including how to report content that shouldn't be here.