Avanti Fellows (www.avantifellows.org) strives to create measurable outcomes and empower students for a brighter future. Through three key interventions, they promote educational equity and provide long-term opportunities.
In the "Entrance Exam Preparation" initiative, Avanti collaborates with Grade 11 and 12 students in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, offering after-school coaching and ed-tech support to help them gain admission to India's top Engineering and Medical colleges.
Their "Sankalp" program, developed in partnership with the Government of Haryana, supplies power back-up, ICT equipment, and specialized workbooks to Grade 9 to 12 students. Avanti also conducts teacher training and monitoring programs to enhance STEM subject understanding.
Additionally, the "Ghar Pe School" initiative was launched during COVID-19, providing at-home learning for low-income students through virtual WhatsApp groups moderated by schoolteachers. Daily lesson plans, video content, assignments, and notes are coordinated to ensure continuous education.
Highlights
- Programs reach 50,000+ students in classrooms and 5 million+ online.
- Weekly content garners 5 million+ views, aiding over a million students.
- Achieved an exceptional 0.6 standard deviation increase in Grade 9 Math proficiency in a year.
- Programs prepare students for IIT JEE and NEET exams.
- Over 60% of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya School students consistently qualify for these exams.
Improving Student Performance and Cultivating Parental Engagement through Empowered Tele-callers
As Avanti Fellows expanded its programs (reaching around 20,000 learners) with a significant no. of students engaged in online learning, parental involvement became pivotal in maintaining learner engagement. Parents play a crucial role in ensuring their children have access to mobile phones for evening online classes. The Avanti team has a tele-calling team responsible for monitoring regular class attendance and performance through calls. When attendance or class marks declined, tele-counsellor's aim is to reactivate students who had dropped out.
The lack of a dedicated app for the tele-caller team resulted in manual processes, leading to inefficiencies, data analysis challenges and limited oversight as the program expanded across states.
We implemented Zoho Creator, a low-code platform that allowed the team to create applications for tele counsellors empowering them with comprehensive student data to enhance interactions and drive higher student engagement in the program. It helped higher management for better monitoring of program hence optimizing overall efficiency and accurate data handling.
Key Business Problem:
The absence of a dedicated app for the tele-counsellor team posed challenges as the scale grew. They relied on manual call making and data capture making the process time-consuming, error-prone and inefficient. This manual approach also limited their capacity to effectively analyze and leverage the data collected during tele-counselling activities.
Program managers faced challenges in monitoring tele-caller’s activities and performance, with limited visibility into these aspects. As the program expanded to multiple states it became difficult to track the direct impact on student attendance and performance. Moreover, the manual assignment of calls to tele-counsellors introduced further complications in the process.
Our Solution - AvantiConnect app
Koita Foundation helped Avanti team to develop a special flow for the tele-counsellors using the Zoho Creator. This customized solution has been designed to streamline call prioritization, provide tele-counsellors with essential student information and significantly enhance their overall productivity.
The application offers effortless student calling with a single click, an intuitive tele-calling system interface that provides real-time insights into call assignments and completions and the automatic generation of comprehensive reports that cover both students who were called and not called, as well as incomplete calls. Calls are assigned on a daily basis, following a well-considered priority order for students, with the objective of optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of tele-calling.
Our programs have scaled rapidly over the past 2 years. We now have ~20,000 learners - most of whom learn online. Parental engagement is critical to keep our learners engaged with the program. Parents need to encourage students to persist, ensure that students have access to their mobile phones to attend online classes in the evening. Our tele calling team is responsible for communicating with parents, updating them on student progress and reactivating students who have dropped out of the program.
Through the support of the Koita Foundation, we have custom built a series of apps on the Zoho Creator platform. The software helps us prioritise calls, provide callers with relevant student data and improve caller efficiency. Drishti, Rekha and Rizwan spent significant time with us helping us think through the design and implementation of the application. We hope to see significant increases in caller efficiency and more importantly, improvements in their effectiveness. In the future, we hope to build on the system to integrate WhatsApp APIs to further improve cost effectiveness.
CEO of Avanti Fellows