Helping 50000 students learn online

The mission for Avanti Fellows is 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.

In 2021, 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.

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 plios and learning in an interactive manner. More than 50,000 students interacted with Plio with a 5x higher retention rate compared to YouTube.