About Avanti Fellows
The mission for Avanti Fellows has always been to provide children from low income backgrounds access to quality higher education enabled by effective supplementary learning programs with significant additional teaching at a student level.
Problem
In 2020, millions of students were forced to study online during the COVID-19 lockdown. Avanti Fellows was running an at-home learning program for the students of public schools in Haryana. They were teaching Math and Science using a combination of simple tools. Content was being served through YouTube Videos while Google Forms were being used for assessments and quizzes.
But student engagement was a big problem with even the best videos seeing a sharp drop off after 1 minute. Additionally, YouTube only provides aggregate statistics with no way to gather data at an individual viewer level.
Solution
To tackle this, the team developed Plio - an open source tool that allows any educator to convert any YouTube video into interactive lessons and gather rich data on user engagement. Soon, the YouTube & Google Form links being sent to students on Whatsapp were switched with Plio links. Students started watching these interactive videos and learning in an interactive manner. More than 40,000 students interacted with Plio with a 5x higher retention rate compared to passive videos.
Currently, Plio has more than 9000+ registered users with 2 other NGOs outside of Avanti Fellows actively using it.
Contribution to Sunbird
Sunbird currently supports Question Sets and Videos separately. However, we have learned that engagement with videos is much higher if questions can be placed inside videos. Once the videos are made interactive, the learning experience is much more enjoyable for the end user.
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