Avanti Fellows (www.avantifellows.org) strives to empower students for a brighter future. Through three key interventions, they promote educational equity and provide long-term opportunities for a career in STEM.
In the "Entrance Exam Preparation" initiative, Avanti collaborates with Grade 11 and 12 students in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya's, 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.
- 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 decline, the 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. It helped higher management to better monitor the program hence optimizing overall efficiency and accurate data handling.
- Lack of a centralized or automated call allocation system led to the manager handling multiple sheets across various programs to access information, resulting in significant time spent on call allotment daily with minimal return on investment.
- Avanti Connect app provides a customized solution using zoho creator for the manager to centrally allocate calls, suggest call priorities and enable call reallocation.
- Centralized call allocation streamlines operations, saving time and reducing errors.
- The lack of a dedicated app for tele-counselors led to manual call-making and data capture, resulting in time-consuming, error-prone and inefficient processes. This approach also limited their ability to analyze and leverage collected data effectively.
- Avanti Connect provides a custom flow for tele-counselors with essential student information, streamlines call prioritization, automates call logs, allows tele-counselors to record call details and offers performance dashboards for data-driven decisions.
- Avanti Connect leads to increased efficiency of tele-counselors and data utilization both leading to better student engagement and program outcomes.
- Program managers faced challenges monitoring tele-caller activities and performance as the program expanded.
- The manager can centrally monitor student interactions and tele-counsellor performance.
- Tele-counselor's access to essential data improved their interactions with students, boosting student engagement in the program.
- Empowering tele-counselors with the ability to determine call priorities makes counselling more focused.
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Enhanced Student Engagement:
- The number of students agreeing to rejoin increased.
- The number of students who rejoined rose.
- Tracking tele-counselor performance has led to increased productivity.
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.
Mr. Akshay Saxena
CEO of Avanti Fellows