Designing the New Core Learning Experience

An active programme, not a finished case study. Launch is targeted for September 2026. I am writing it now because the design decisions made today are the ones worth talking about, not the post-rationalised version after launch.

The problem

Alef's existing learning platform serves 1.8 million learners across multiple education systems. It works. It also carries a decade of accumulated decisions, integrations, and pedagogical assumptions that make it harder to evolve than to extend. The New Core Learning Experience, internally called Weavr, is the rebuild: a new platform that has to honour the strengths of the current product while clearing the constraints that limit where the company can go next.

The design challenge is harder than a redesign. NCLE has to support multiple curricula, multiple languages, multiple device contexts, and multiple stakeholder types: learners, teachers, parents, administrators, and ministries. All of them, without becoming a generic tool that serves none of them well. Check My Understanding, the core assessment type, has to feel native to each context while sharing a single underlying engine.

What I am doing

Three things, in parallel.

Discovery as a design responsibility, not an input to design

My team is embedded in the discovery cycles for each major NCLE workstream. Designers run user research, synthesise findings, and present them alongside product and engineering. The shift from “design receives a brief” to “design owns the discovery” is the single most important change I have made to how the team operates. It is what makes design strategic rather than executional.

A gate process with explicit entry and exit criteria

Every NCLE workstream moves through defined gates: discovery complete, concept validated, build-ready, launch-ready. Each gate has criteria the team agrees to before work starts. This sounds like governance overhead. In practice, it has stopped the pattern of work drifting between phases without clear hand-offs and accountability.

Designers leading full discovery-to-ship cycles

The third goal is the hardest: shifting ownership so that individual designers lead their workstream end-to-end, not just the visual layer. Some are ready. Some are growing into it. The work this year is building the support structures (paired reviews, escalation paths, decision logs) that let people own work at this level without burning out.

Where the work stands now

• Brand tokens and the design system unified into a single canonical source of truth
• Discovery runs in progress for the major learner-facing workstreams
• Check My Understanding (CMU) prototyping live across two curriculum contexts
• Design has earned a seat at the product table for NCLE planning, which was not the case 18 months ago
• WCAG accessibility audit complete with action items in the backlog

What I expect to learn

The honest version: I do not yet know which of the operational changes will hold under launch pressure. Gate processes look elegant in steady state and get tested when timelines compress. The discovery-led model assumes designers have the time and authority to push back on premature solutions. That assumption gets tested every sprint.

What I am confident of: the team is more capable, more autonomous, and more central to product decisions than they were when this programme started. That is the leading indicator. The lagging indicator, learner outcomes from the new platform, is what we will be measured on after launch.