Liferay in Education: How to Enhance Learning with a Digital Experience Platform

Let’s think of education as an evolving city. Educational institutions and companies with structured internal learning programs constantly need to construct new pathways for learning, but without the right infrastructure, there are risks of fragmented learning environments and an inability to adapt to evolving educational demands and technologies. As a robust DXP platform,  Liferay here can act as the blueprint for this digital learning city, enabling seamless interaction, personalized experiences, and scalable growth. Whether you’re enhancing student engagement or optimizing corporate training and certification processes, Liferay can empower you to design, deliver, and manage your learning experiences.

As a Liferay development partner, we want to share our insights obtained while providing Liferay implementation services for almost 20 years on how you can use this platform to its fullest potential and create seamless workflows and connected learning environments.

Top 5 challenges with digital experiences in the education industry

Education is no longer limited to traditional learning methods. As the demand for hybrid and remote learning grows, so do the challenges associated with creating seamless digital learning experiences. Institutions and companies alike are faced with numerous obstacles when it comes to delivering engaging and efficient education. Let’s explore the top challenges in the education sector, especially when they lack a robust digital experience platform (DXP) like Liferay.

1. Fragmented learning environments

Imagine building a city with roads that don’t connect. You will see that students or employees constantly switch between platforms, losing their way in the process. Many educational institutions and organizations deal with disjointed systems where learning content, communication tools, and administrative services are scattered across multiple platforms. This lack of integration not only frustrates learners but also impacts engagement and retention.

According to Info-Tech’s research on IT unification in the education sector, many institutions struggle with siloed data and scattered systems. These disjointed platforms not only lead to a lack of cohesive learning experiences but also create administrative overhead, as IT teams waste valuable time managing disparate systems rather than focusing on enhancing educational outcomes. For learners and employees, this results in a confusing, fragmented experience, making it harder to stay engaged and complete tasks efficiently. Without a centralized digital platform in education or portal, the complexity and inefficiencies only increase, amplifying these challenges across the entire organization​.

2. Lack of personalized learning paths

Without personalized paths, learners (whether students or employees) are left on a one-size-fits-all route that doesn’t suit their needs. Personalized learning ensures adaptive content delivery based on individual progress and preferences, but it’s often missing without a proper centralized solution.

The survey shows that 73% of current students expect the educational content they receive to be customized to their unique needs, academic paths, and situations. Without this level of personalization, institutions risk disengagement, lower performance, and missed opportunities for learners to reach their full potential.

3. Poor user experience and accessibility

Many digital learning platforms fall short on usability and accessibility, leaving learners with a frustrating experience. Research shows that bad UX, such as confusing navigation, inconsistent interfaces, and complex systems, can negatively impact cognitive load and learner satisfaction. 

The study indicates that inefficient design forces learners to spend more mental effort on interacting with the platform rather than focusing on the educational content itself. This not only hinders learning progress but also decreases motivation and engagement, making it even harder for institutions to support student success effectively​. A well-designed digital platform for education can resolve these issues by providing a unified, user-friendly platform that integrates systems, improves navigation, and delivers real-time analytics, ensuring that both administrators and learners benefit from a seamless, engaging experience.

4. Data silos and poor analytics

In a thriving city, decision-makers need access to real-time data on traffic, infrastructure, and citizen needs. The same goes for education. Institutions and companies need actionable insights into learner progress, engagement, and outcomes. However, many platforms create data silos, where valuable information is trapped in different systems, making it nearly impossible to track learner performance or optimize content delivery.

The struggle with data integration across systems can lead to missed opportunities to enhance learning strategies and improve outcomes. A unified digital experience platform in education industry is essential for using data and driving informed decisions.

5. Scalability and future-proofing

As cities grow, so must their infrastructure. However, many educational platforms are built without scalability in mind, leading to crashes, slowdowns, or lack of flexibility when institutions or companies need to expand their digital learning programs. Without a digital education platform that can scale efficiently, institutions risk facing limitations as their user base grows.

As you can see, these challenges show how critical it is to invest in a solid digital experience platform. But overcoming these obstacles isn’t just about avoiding pitfalls; it’s about unlocking new opportunities. In the next section, we offer to explore how Liferay’s capabilities can address these pain points, transforming digital learning into a dynamic, engaging, and adaptable experience and ensuring seamless digitalization in education.

Liferay features and capabilities: overcoming e-learning challenges

Liferay isn’t just another platform, it’s a comprehensive digital experience solution designed to address the key challenges faced by educational institutions and companies that engage in employee training, certification, and assessments. Being a flexible, scalable, and integrated system, Liferay is designed to help you overcome the obstacles you face and unlock the full potential of your digital learning environment.

1. Centralized hub for digital experiences

Liferay’s core strength lies in its ability to act as a centralized DXP, integrating multiple systems and tools into one seamless environment. With Liferay’s modular architecture, institutions and companies can bring together learning management systems (LMS), content management systems (CMS), communication tools, and administrative platforms, all under one roof.

Technical advantage: Liferay digital experience platform uses APIs and microservices to integrate with third-party applications, ensuring that you can manage diverse tools from a single interface. Its modular design enables the addition of new features without disrupting existing systems, ensuring a future-proof platform.

Business benefit: By integrating various systems into a unified digital experience, Liferay eliminates the fragmentation of learning environments, enhancing user experience and boosting engagement. This leads to more efficient processes, where learners can access all their materials and services in one place, reducing frustration and improving retention.

2. Personalized user journeys 

Liferay’s audience targeting feature allows institutions and organizations to create personalized learning paths based on user behaviors, roles, and preferences. By segmenting users into groups, administrators can deliver customized content, ensuring learners get exactly what they need at the right time.

Technical advantage: Liferay uses data-driven insights and user profiles to adjust content and recommendations dynamically. By using rules and personalization features, it delivers unique content experiences to different user groups within the same system.

Business benefit: With personalized learning paths, educational institutions and companies can improve engagement and learning outcomes. Learners are more likely to stay motivated and complete their courses when the content is tailored to their specific needs and interests. Personalization also drives higher satisfaction rates, improving both learner retention and institutional reputation.

3. Advanced analytics and reporting

Liferay’s analytics capabilities allow institutions to gather and analyze data on learner engagement, progress, and outcomes. Liferay DXP integrates analytics dashboards that offer real-time insights, making it easy to track performance across courses, programs, or even individual learners.

Technical advantage: Liferay’s built-in analytics tools provide customizable dashboards that integrate with third-party analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics. This enables administrators to track and report key metrics while using data-driven insights.

Business benefit: With Liferay’s advanced analytics, educational institutions and companies can identify areas for improvement, adjust course content, and make data-driven decisions that optimize learning experiences. Real-time data eliminates guesswork, helping organizations fine-tune their programs for better results.

5. Scalability 

Liferay is designed to scale effortlessly, making it ideal for institutions and companies that need flexibility as they grow. Whether you’re supporting thousands of students or employees, Liferay’s architecture supports both horizontal and vertical scaling, and its cloud deployment options ensure you’re prepared for future growth.

Technical advantage: Liferay DXP is built for scalability, supporting clustering, load balancing, and cloud deployment on platforms like AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes. It can handle large user volumes without compromising performance, thanks to its ability to distribute workloads efficiently.

Business benefit: Scalability means institutions can expand their digital learning environments without worrying about system crashes or slowdowns. By deploying Liferay in the cloud, you can also reduce infrastructure costs, improve uptime, and ensure that their platform can evolve alongside your needs.

6. Content management tools

Liferay’s robust content management system allows you to manage learning materials with ease. From rich media content like videos and interactive lessons to traditional documents and quizzes, Liferay makes content creation and distribution seamless. Moreover, its multi-language support ensures content is accessible to global audiences.

Technical advantage: Liferay CMS supports all types of content and offers version control, workflow management, and multilingual capabilities. Its intuitive editor enables non-technical users to manage content while Liferay DXP developers can take advantage of extensive customization options during edtech software development.

Business benefit: Efficient content management reduces administrative overhead and ensures that learners always have access to the most up-to-date materials. Multi-language support allows you to reach a diverse, global audience, breaking down potential barriers.

7. Security and seamless Integration

For secure edtech app development, Liferay offers enterprise-grade security features alongside seamless integration with existing systems, ensuring that your learners’ data is always protected while all tools work together harmoniously.

Technical advantage: Liferay provides robust security protocols, including role-based access control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), and compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR. It also supports seamless integration with other systems through REST and SOAP APIs, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.

Business benefit: Liferay ensures that sensitive information, from student data to employee training records, is kept safe. Additionally, seamless integration with existing tools reduces complexity, cutting down on costs associated with managing multiple platforms and ensuring a smooth digital learning experience across systems.

8. Tools for enhanced collaboration

Liferay comes equipped with social collaboration tools that allow institutions and companies to create communities, discussion forums, and knowledge-sharing spaces for learners to interact and grow together.

Technical advantage: Liferay’s built-in collaboration tools include message boards, wikis, blogs, and activity streams, fostering a sense of community among learners. It also supports social login and user-generated content, encouraging active participation.

Business benefit: By enabling peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing, Liferay enhances engagement and keeps learners more connected. Whether it’s students in a university setting or employees in corporate training, the ability to interact with peers increases retention, fosters innovation, and improves overall satisfaction with the learning process.

By addressing the core challenges of digital education environments, Liferay empowers institutions and organizations to create personalized, scalable, and future-proof learning experiences. However, the true strength of Liferay lies not only in its features but also in how they come together to form a unified solution. In the next section, we’ll explore Liferay case studies, including Aimprosoft’s examples of providing edtech app development services for an educational organization and certification center, highlighting how Liferay can transform e-learning for institutions and businesses worldwide.

Liferay real-world use cases: how Liferay can improve e-learning operations

Liferay’s true impact is best seen in real-world applications where it transforms e-learning operations. From optimizing learning management to improving engagement and streamlining administrative workflows, Liferay provides institutions and companies with the tools they need during education app development to enhance educational experiences. 

Case #1: Department of Education (Western Australia)

The story: The Department of Education, supporting over 800 government schools, faced a fragmented digital landscape that slowed productivity. Staff had to navigate across 68 disconnected sites to find critical resources, impacting efficiency.

Challenges:

• Time wasted searching for job-critical information;
• Inconsistent, inaccessible documents across devices;
• Lack of standardized content creation processes.

Solution: Liferay DXP powered the Department’s intranet, Ikon, integrating all systems under one platform. The personnel now has centralized access to resources, streamlined content creation, and an enhanced user experience.

Results and key metrics:

• Increased accessibility: Ikon serves 77,000 staff across 800+ schools, with 70,000 concurrent users and 1.9 million pageviews per month.
• Enhanced mobile use: Thanks to the creation of responsive design during education mobile app development, views rose from 2% to 20%.
• Streamlined processes: Simplified content creation improved overall efficiency.

How Aimprosoft transforms the learning experiences with Liferay 

Case #1: User-friendly portal for the Ministry of Education

The story: Aimprosoft partnered with a Liferay education development company, which won the tender, to assist with Liferay portal development for the Ministry of Education of one of the European countries.  The company required additional resources to deliver the project on time. Together, we developed functionality for the following user groups: 

• For administrators to manage school information; 
• For parents to register their children on the portal, request education in specific schools, and review academic performance; 
• For teachers to perform daily activities like filling the electronic journal, viewing attendance, etc. 

We also developed custom widgets and a Liferay theme, integrated with third-party APIs, created a library of reusable components, and designed the system architecture and core components.

Project outcomes: 

• Faster portal delivery thanks to the library of reusable components created by the Aimprosoft team and multiple out-of-the-box features offered by Liferay.
• By opting for Liferay, we eliminated the need to create many functions from scratch, thus reducing the client’s total cost of education software development.
• A versatile and user-friendly portal that provides seamless and intuitive experiences for administrators, teachers, and parents.
• Timely project delivery and compliance with set standards were made possible by promptly filling resource gaps for the client.

Tech stack: Liferay, Java, jQuery, Bootstrap

Case #2: Certification platform

The story: Initially, the client turned to us for Liferay DXP consulting. But, after a positive consulting experience, they decided to opt for our Liferay development services to assist with portal migration.

Their Liferay platform connected certification centers, examination providers, and candidates. It was built on the legacy 6.2 version. Meanwhile, the company wanted to move to Liferay DXP 7.4, which offered many new features, especially for content management. Additionally, they wanted to expand the existing functionality, so we implemented an advanced dashboard, exam booking & rescheduling, report generation, candidate registration, and integration with third-party APIs.

During our work on the project, the portal was successfully upgraded, and the code was upgraded and refactored, considering best practices and new Liferay features. Styling updates and Liferay customization were implemented according to new requirements. 

Project outcomes: 

• Improved and expanded functionality helped streamline user experience and ensure customer satisfaction.
• Refactoring of the source code performed by Aimprosoft resulted in better portal performance and reliability.
• Updated third-party system integrations ensured service availability and smooth user experience.

Tech stack: Liferay, Java, OSGi, Apache Axis, HTML/CSS, jQuery

Wrapping up

Just as a thriving city needs solid infrastructure, education, whether academic or corporate, relies on adaptable, scalable digital foundations. Liferay serves as the robust core for these modern learning environments, providing solutions that enhance user engagement, streamline operations, and secure sensitive data. By choosing Liferay and collaborating with Liferay DXP consulting partner who can tailor and implement the platform, you can future-proof your educational strategies, enabling seamless learning experiences. 

With extensive expertise in Liferay solutions, Aimprosoft is here to guide you through this transformation, whether you’re implementing a new system or enhancing existing infrastructure. Contact us to explore how we can help elevate your digital learning environment with Liferay.

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