ATLAS

The Client

Established by the California state legislature, Authentic Tasks for Learning and Assessment in Science (ATLAS) is a statewide repository of high-quality, curriculum-embedded performance tasks mapped to the California Next Generation Science Standards, managed by the Los Angeles County Office of Education with support from the California Department of Education.

The Situation

The team behind the ATLAS initiative wanted to create a community platform that showcased curriculum and teaching materials shared and created by validated users within the California Department of Education. They also needed tools that would allow content editors to populate pages directly from PDF forms, eliminating manual copying. 

The Challenge

The project involved several significant technical hurdles. ATLAS needed a traditional Solr search enhanced with an AI-powered RAG layer to improve natural-language discoverability while ensuring results remained accurate and intuitive. In addition, it needed to use AI to transform more than 1,400 PDF curriculum documents into structured web pages, without compromising quality or consistency at scale. These advanced capabilities then had to be delivered without impacting site performance or introducing latency. 

Finally, ATLAS needed to ensure AI tools were embedded directly into Drupal through a simple, unobtrusive interface, ensuring the experience felt seamless and easy for educators to use. 

The Solution

Acquia partner Velir x Brooklyn Data joined with the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), which manages ATLAS. Together, the teams designed and built a modern, scalable platform that centralizes high-quality, standards-aligned science tasks into one unified experience. 

By consolidating these resources into a single Drupal/Acquia-powered solution, ATLAS replaces previously fragmented access points with one intuitive destination, reducing friction in how educators discover and implement standards-aligned content. And users can easily save/bookmark lessons in their profiles, group them into collections and search, sort and filter them. They can also share them with others.

The platform introduced AI-powered natural language search, significantly improving content discoverability by allowing educators to search using everyday language rather than exact keywords or filters. In addition, integrating social functionality through Disqus, educators can comment, like, and share insights directly within the platform. This transforms ATLAS from a static repository into an interactive professional learning community.

Acquia Cloud Next provided ATLAS with a resilient, reliable Drupal hosting platform, backed by Acquia Search to power the multitude of search needs and deliver highly relevant items to users at the right time. Acquia Code Studio kept the team running, providing build-time assurance and deployment in the background. Using Acquia Search powered by SearchStax, the teams integrated Solr’s new ‘vector’ data type to intelligently index content and store data for AI search retrieval, a cornerstone of the site. 

The Results

The ATLAS platform has just launched, so formal performance metrics are not yet available. However, the project has already delivered measurable organizational improvements and established a strong foundation for long-term impact.

From an organizational standpoint, LACOE now has:

• A scalable, enterprise-grade Drupal/Acquia infrastructure capable of supporting statewide growth.
• A centralized content management model that streamlines publishing and maintenance workflows.
• A future-ready foundation for capturing engagement analytics and continuous improvement metrics.

While user adoption, engagement rates, and time-on-task metrics are still being gathered post-launch, the immediate impact is clear: ATLAS modernizes access to authentic science learning and operationalizes standards-aligned instruction in a way that is more discoverable, collaborative, and sustainable. As usage scales, the platform is positioned to drive measurable increases in educator engagement, resource utilization, and instructional alignment across the region.