Innovative Leadership in Brazilian Education

A Digital Strategy for True Transformation

For decades, companies believed that technology in and of itself was the solution to modernizing their businesses, and replicated cookie-cutter models to limited success. As time passed, companies learned that they needed to go beyond technology and rethink their business processes in transformative ways if they wanted to stay competitive in a digital economy.

For Editora Moderna, this meant finding new ways to transfer knowledge to students with different learning profiles, while increasing teacher engagement and making technology a fundamental part of the teaching process. The company’s existing platform made it impossible to reach these targets. It needed to rethink its entire technology model so that it could meet requirements and integrate seamlessly with the current architecture.

The challenge was daunting; the company’s planned time-to-market was short and, as a publisher, it had an extremely large volume of content to manage. On top of this, Moderna had many obstacles to overcome with its current systems, including problems integrating with legacy systems, a lack of qualified labor to handle proprietary technology, a dearth of developer partners and inadequate support, as well as difficulties updating the platform with new content.

A User-Centric Redesign That Doubled Mobile Visitors

Once these challenges were mapped, Moderna began to search for the most appropriate tool, ultimately choosing Liferay as the best fit. The Liferay platform met the following prerequisites:

• Easy implementation and customization of mobile-ready sites
• High capacity for integration, in keeping with the best practices on the market
• Freedom and flexibility for internal teams
• Consistent support
• Ranked a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals
• Available Learning Management System (LMS) plugin
• Advanced consulting

After the selection process, Moderna needed to decide the best way to manage the transition of its entire portal to the Liferay solution. The planning required for this transition was made possible through a strategic alignment between Moderna, GM5 (the official partner) and the Liferay team.

The portal, named Moderna Plus, was redesigned with a focus on usability and performance. A new panel, with sections for Favorites and customized content for each user (for example, specific classes and groups per person), has improved engagement. Teachers and students are able to work on their tablets as part of a “Go Mobile” strategy and search is multifaceted, improving results from different educational titles.

Today, a partial move to the adopted solution has already been completed on six of the publisher’s sites, including the Moderna Plus collection, and a new website has been developed for this new scenario. The benefits of switching to Liferay are very clear: page searches are better positioned, site visits are more frequent, and there is a higher number of users. Best of all, visits to the site from mobile devices have doubled, affirming that Editora Moderna has successfully found a way to serve its teachers and students in a modern way for the digital age.