Avanti Fellows (www.avantifellows.org) works to empower students and promote educational equity, focusing on long-term opportunities in STEM careers. Through its Entrance Exam Preparation initiative, Avanti supports Grade 11 and 12 students in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas to gain admission to top Engineering and Medical colleges. The Sankalp program, in partnership with the Government of Haryana, enhances learning for Grades 9 to 12 through teacher training, ICT equipment, and specialized workbooks.
Additionally, the Ghar Pe School initiative provides at-home learning through virtual groups. Avanti's programs have impacted 50,000+ students in classrooms and 5 million+ online.
Improving Student Performance and Cultivating Parental Engagement through Empowered Tele-callers
- 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.
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.
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