Extending the Academy

Extending the Academy 🔗

The Layer5 Cloud Academy is a modular learning management system (LMS) designed for building learning paths (also referred to as specializations) and interactive cloud-native challenges. It is deeply integrated into the Layer5 cloud ecosystem and Kanvas—a visual designer and operator for cloud-native infrastructure. This integration enables embedding live visualizations, interactive designs, and contextual experiences directly within courses.

Who Can Extend the Academy? 🔗

Organizations subscribed to the Enterprise Plan have the capability to:

• Create and manage their own academy content
• Publish courses to the Layer5 Cloud Platform
• Enjoy full multi-tenancy, white-labeling, and customization support

How to Extend the Academy 🔗

The Cloud Academy is designed to avoid vendor lock-in. Enterprise users manage their academy content in their own Git repositories—you own your content and data.

Content is sourced using the Hugo static site engine. To get started, use the Academy Starter Template. This provides a working scaffold based on the Hugo directory structure, pre-configured with the custom layer5-academy theme.

✅ No need to write HTML, manage layouts, or build custom shortcodes. Everything is abstracted behind a simple markdown-based authoring experience.

Directory Overview 🔗

When you clone the template, you’ll see a familiar Hugo structure:

academy-example/
├── content/
│   └── learning-paths/
│       └── org-name/              # Replace with your actual org name
├── static/
│   └── org-name/                  # Static assets (images, custom CSS)
├── layouts/
│   └── shortcodes/
│       └── org-name/              # Custom shortcodes (optional)

⚠️ Organizational Scoping 🔗

To ensure isolation between different organizations:

• All your content must reside under your scoped folder: content/learning-paths/<your-org-name>/

• Only content within your organization folder will be published.

• Use the same org-name consistently across content/, static/, and layouts/shortcodes/.

• Content outside of your scoped folders will not be picked up in production.

Adding Content and Assets 🔗

You can begin by adding your learning material under:

content/learning-paths/<your-org-name>/

This folder acts as the root scope for all your learning paths. Supporting assets can be placed as follows:

• static/<your-org-name>/ – images, stylesheets, other static files
• layouts/shortcodes/<your-org-name>/ – optional Hugo shortcodes for custom widgets

🔒 This organizational scoping ensures that customizations made by one organization do not affect others.

Learning Path Structure 🔗

Each learning path can include multiple courses, chapters, and lessons, organized in a clear hierarchy.

learning-paths/
└── <your-org-name>/
    └── <learning-path-name>/
        ├── _index.md             # Metadata for the learning path
        └── <course-name>/
            ├── _index.md         # Metadata for the course
            └── chapter-1/
                ├── _index.md     # Metadata (requirements, summary, etc.)
                └── content/
                    ├── lesson-1.md
                    └── lesson-2.md

Each _index.md file contains frontmatter and overview content for that level (path, course, chapter).