What Happens When You Stop Renting Your Curriculum

A practical look at trading proprietary WYSIWYG editors for plain-text repositories, automated linters, and true instructional ownership. September arrives, and higher education runs on a very familiar, exhausting script.

Fall 2026 launch week is here.

Your inbox is flooded. Faculty across the course portfolio stare at glowing screens past midnight, click through three nested menus in a proprietary Canvas LMS, manually hunt down broken contrast ratios, and pray a third-party plugin doesn’t break before morning classes go live.

We have spent decades accepting this friction as the cost of doing business.

Updating course shells. Chasing down ADA Title II compliance retroactively. Adjusting to a new round of institutional software updates and starting the content grind all over again.

Getting locked into proprietary platforms is simply what you do.

Excep—

A practical look at trading proprietary WYSIWYG editors for plain-text repositories, automatory of institutional rebellion.

I wasn’t looking to burn down the LMS on day one. But I couldn’t ignore the math of what running a modern course portfolio actually cost me.

During the Fall 2026 launch across my exercise science course portfolio—from EXW101 and EXW150 to EXW245 and EXW265—the friction

We have spent decades accepting this friction as the cost of doing business.

Updating course shells. Chasing down ADA Title II compliance retroactively. Adjusting to a new round of institutional software updates and stae mobile responsiveness. Spending precious hours fighting software interfaces instead of focusing on expert instructional design and student engagement on the ground.

Those aren’t estimates. I have the git commit histories, accessibility audit logs, and late-night debug sessions to prove them.

My original plan was the same conventional script everyone else follows.

I would buy into another ecosystem add-on, accept the recurring subscription licensing fees, train on proprietary workarounds, and hope the platform up

During the ?t scramble my semantic HTML before the semester started.

Perfectly reasonable.

Then I looked more closely at what locking my curriculum into closed systems was actually buying me: endless remediation loops, platform lock-in, and zero true ownership of my educational assets.

That got my attention.

Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking as much about

Those aren’t estimates. I have the git commit histories, accessibility audit logs, and late-night debug sessions to prove them.

My original plan was the same conventional script everyone else followation thought about digital accessibility and instructional scaling, we thought primarily about downstream enforcement.

How do I audit the course after it’s built?

Could I hire more instructional designers to fix broken shells?

Would another software patch solve my systemic vulnerabilities?

The Fall 2026 launch forced me to look at the other side of the equation.

What did course authoring cost me in cognitive load, time, and institutional sovereignty? And, more importantly: Did it have to cost that much?

That question changed everything.

Moving away from proprietary lock-in wasn’t some magical solution where I migrated to plain-text repositories, compiled my static assets, and all my administrative hurdles disappeared overnight.

It meant unlearning habits built over decades, managing my own version-control workflows, adopting Curriculum-as-Code pipelines, and wrestling with an impressive collection of technical acronyms that nob

How do I audit the course after it’s built?

Could I hire more instructional designers to fix broken shells?

Woullly changed the calculation.

Instead of accepting a closed software ecosystem and designing my courses around its limitations, I began designing my curriculum around my students’ and faculty’s actual needs.

I still advise, build, and audit course portfolios. If an institutional partnership or a custom deployment comes up, great.

But I no longer fight proprietary WYSIWYG editors or chase software patches to keep a Syllabus live.

Most days, I consider my course design workflow calm.

Apparently, tha

It meant unlearning habited code as a curriculum.

This isn’t a story about Silicon Valley disruption.

Plenty of higher-ed tech stories on the internet are about someone who raised $50 million for an AI-powered learning management portal or automated an entire campus with a proprietary black-box algorithm.

This isn’t one of those stories.

I taught classes. I built content. I made some smart technical decisions.

I made some pretty clumsy ones too. Those post-mortems are coming.

Eventually, I accumulated enough reusable components, au

I still advise,ility linters, and semantic templates that breaking away from closed platforms became a realistic option.

Yet simplicity hasn’t stopped mattering.

I still have institutional accessibility standards to maintain. Version histories to track. Multi-device rendering to verify. OER compliance to guard.

The difference is that I now look at course infrastructure somewhat differently.

The objective isn’t necessarily to accumulate as many fancy third-party ed-tech tools as possible.

The objective is to have

Plenty of higher-ed is mine, and that is enough.

Of course, figuring out what “enough” means in higher education is where things get interesting.

I suspect there are a lot of faculty members, instructional designers, and academic technologists asking some version of the question I found myself asking:

How many more semesters do I really need to spend fighting my own software?

And there may be students and practitioners asking an even better question:

How can I structure my learning

Yet simplicity hasn’t stopped mattering.

I still have itive overhauls to experience truly accessible, equitable education?

I don’t think the answer is identical for every institution.

For me, part of the answer turned out to be stripping out the proprietary bloat, embracing Curriculum-as-Code, and learning to build semantic, WCAG-compliant learning assets using plain-text repositories.

For someone else, it might mean migrating to open-source alternatives, championing open workflows, or simply deciding that paying recurring licensing fees for bloated software isn?I suspect therer year behind a legacy interface.

Buying back instructional time.

It’s been long enough since my full migration away from closed LMS authoring to see the shift in real time.

I’m still here.

More importantly, I’ve started to understand that the thing I really bought wasn’t just technical efficiency.

It was instructional sovereignty.