Three Resource Layers: Personal, Institutional, and Public

A teacher creates a lesson plan. That lesson plan belongs to the teacher (personal layer). The school may require a copy for its records (institutional layer). Other teachers may want to adapt it (public layer).

Most education tools treat resources as either private or public. You create something, it is yours. Or you publish it, and anyone can see it. This binary does not match how education actually works.

Curriva implements three distinct resource layers, each with its own access rules, workflows, and value propositions.

Layer 1: Personal Workspace

The personal layer is where educators create and organize their own materials. It is private by default. No one else can see, edit, or use your personal resources unless you explicitly share them.

This layer is optimized for the individual workflow. Fast creation. Easy organization. Version history that lets you roll back changes. Templates that speed up common tasks (schemes of work, lesson plans, assessments).

Key features of the personal layer:

• Templates: Pre-built structures for common resource types. A lesson plan template includes sections for objectives, activities, assessment, and materials. A scheme of work template maps weeks to topics. An assessment template includes question types and marking schemes.
• AI assistance: AI helps generate content within the structure. It suggests learning objectives based on the curriculum. It proposes activities based on the topic. It generates assessment questions aligned with [examination patterns](/blog/waec-neco-examination-patterns).
• Version history: Every save creates a version. You can see what changed, when, and revert to any previous version.
• Search and filtering: Full-text search across all your resources. Filter by subject, level, type, date created, and custom tags.
• Offline support: Drafts are saved locally and synced when the connection is available. You can work on a lesson plan during a power outage and it syncs when the internet returns.

The personal layer is where most educators will spend most of their time. It is the foundation that makes the other layers possible.

Layer 2: Institutional Workspace

The institutional layer is where schools and organizations manage their collective resources. It is shared within the institution but not with the outside world.

This layer solves the problem of resource fragmentation. In most schools, teaching materials are scattered across individual teachers' computers. When a teacher leaves, their materials leave with them. When a department needs a consistent set of assessments, each teacher creates their own version. When the school needs to audit resource quality, there is no central repository to audit.

The institutional layer provides:

• Shared resource library: All resources created by members of the institution are available in a central repository. Teachers can search for and adapt materials created by colleagues.
• Departmental organization: Resources are organized by department. The Mathematics department has its own collection of schemes, plans, and assessments. The Science department has its own. Cross-departmental resources are accessible to all.
• Templates and standards: The institution can create templates that enforce formatting standards. If the school requires a specific lesson plan format, the template ensures all teachers use it.
• Access control: Different roles have different permissions. Department heads can approve resources. Teachers can create and edit. New teachers can view but not modify until their probation period ends.
• Analytics: The institution can see how resources are being used. Which templates are most popular. Which departments have the most resources. Which teachers are creating the most materials.
• Ownership and continuity: Resources belong to the institution, not the individual teacher. When a teacher leaves, their materials remain in the institutional library. This is not about taking ownership from teachers. It is about ensuring the school retains the materials it paid the teacher to create.

The institutional layer is essential for schools that want to build institutional knowledge. Without it, every teacher starts from scratch every term. With it, the school accumulates a growing library of quality materials.

Layer 3: Public Ecosystem

The public layer is where resources are shared with the wider education community. This is the ecosystem: a marketplace, a commons, and a knowledge base.

The public layer is not a free-for-all. Resources go through quality processes:

• Attribution: Every public resource credits its original creator. Adaptations chain back to the source. If Teacher A creates a scheme of work, and Teacher B adapts it, both are credited.
• Licensing: Creators choose how their resources can be used. Some resources are open for anyone to adapt. Some allow viewing but not modification. Some require attribution. The licensing is clear and machine-readable.
• Quality signals: Resources accumulate quality signals over time. Downloads. Adaptations. Ratings from other educators. These signals help other teachers find high-quality materials.
• Curriculum alignment: Public resources are tagged with curriculum alignment information. A teacher looking for "JSS2 Mathematics, second term, Algebraic Expressions" can find resources that exactly match their need.
• Search and discovery: The public layer includes powerful search by subject, level, topic, resource type, quality rating, and license type.

The public layer is where the ecosystem effect emerges. As more educators contribute resources, the value of the ecosystem increases for everyone. A teacher in Sokoto can adapt a lesson plan created by a teacher in Lagos. A teacher in Rivers can use assessment questions developed by a teacher in Abuja.

How the Layers Interact

The three layers are not isolated. Resources flow between them:

1. Personal to Institutional: A teacher creates a resource in their personal workspace. They publish it to the institutional library. Other teachers in the school can now use it.
2. Institutional to Public: The institution reviews a resource and decides to publish it to the public ecosystem. The resource is now available to all educators.
3. Public to Personal: A teacher finds a public resource. They import it into their personal workspace. They adapt it for their specific context. The adaptation is private until they choose to share it.
4. Public to Institutional: An institution finds a public resource. They import it into their institutional library. They customize it for their school. Other teachers in the school can now use the adapted version.

This flow, create, share, adapt, publish, mirrors how educational materials actually develop. No resource is created in isolation. Every resource builds on what came before. The three layers formalize this process and make it visible.

The Technical Architecture

Each layer has different technical requirements:

• Personal: Optimized for fast creation, offline support, and AI assistance. Uses client-side Supabase queries with RLS policies that restrict access to the resource owner.
• Institutional: Optimized for shared access, version control, and analytics. Uses server-side queries with RLS policies that check organization membership.
• Public: Optimized for search, discovery, and licensing. Uses a public API with no authentication required for read access. Write access requires authentication and resource ownership verification.

The layers share the same database tables but with different RLS policies. A resource has an owner_id, an organization_id, and a visibility field. The RLS policies use these fields to determine who can see, edit, and use the resource.

This is not three separate systems. It is one system with three access modes. The same resource can exist in multiple layers simultaneously. The layers are defined by who can see and do what, not by where the data lives.

Related Reading

For how schools manage resources within the institutional layer, see Institutional Workspace Deep Dive. For how the editor widget system works within each layer, see Widget Architecture. For how the three resource layers enforce access patterns, see Three Resource Layers.