1.1 About the application:

Successful educational outcomes are not purely dependent on curriculum and infrastructure but also depend upon the attitude and interaction between the key educators, that is, teachers and parents. While the teachers educate kids at school, the parents must be updated on their child’s progress so that they can positively contribute to their growth. 

Unfortunately, most parents are not aware of their child’s performance at school and receive this information only while collecting their annual report cards. The fault doesn’t lie with the parents or teachers, either. Owing to their busy schedules, the manual transmission of the information is impossible. This is where Vidyaura app comes in handy. Vidyaura is a digital technology product that not only facilitates school management but also improves the interaction between teachers and parents.

Vidyaura:

Vidyaura is a cloud-based mobile application aimed at facilitating school management and making it easier for parents to monitor the progress of their children in school.

Vidyaura is available as a web-based school platform to facilitate school administration management, and also as a mobile app for Android that can be used by parents and teachers.  The app makes it possible for the teachers to report and update the performance of the students digitally, which can be seamlessly accessed by the parents. 

Below, we will talk more about the Vidyaura app and its development at DCI.

Defining Problem:

• Most parents are aware that they must keep a tab on the progress of their children at school but don’t know how to do it.
• In most cases, parents must contact the administration or parents of other children to check whether the information shared by their child is correct or not.
• Parents rely on their children to share complete information about the activities at school. However, some children may forget to share a certain event with their parents, or, in a few cases, deliberately hide the information. 

Goal:

Based on the problems shared above, the owners of Vidyaura app decided to create a digital platform that could bridge the communication gap between teachers and parents. With this platform, parents can monitor their kids’ progress on the fly, anytime and anywhere. To ensure this, it was pertinent to create a user-friendly platform that was easily understandable and not intimidating. 

1.2 Challenges:

Design:

A simple website with a cheerful and easy to navigate design to help users track the progress of their children at school and be in the know at all times. 

User Flow:

• Easy navigation
• Share and view pictures and videos on social media feed  
• View student’s report cards and marks 
• Apply for leave and view leave reports on the mobile app
• View attendance of the child
• Get instant notification on any happening from the school
• Polling option for parents to take collective decisions on important issues
• School can receive instant responses from parents with the help of the RSVP option
• Teachers can update the syllabus, time table, feedback, attendance, etc., on the app
• View fees and make an online payment

Data Management: 

Required to manage huge data for attendance and social media feed (videos/pictures, etc.).

Application Reliability: 

• The app must not slow down or crash when huge data is loaded
• The app should be secure, reliable and made available at all times

Admin Panel: 

Easy and secure admin panel:

• Manage different users, create sub-admins and assign roles to them
• Admin should be able to view all the information of the users and their activities through the admin panel

1.3 Proposed Solution:

Phase 1:

DCI understood that the proposed mobile application was a complicated and unique app that was meant to serve as a communication platform between the teachers and the parents. The key purpose of the app was to keep all parties updated about a student’s performance at all times.  

DCI planned to proceed with the app development in 2 phases after gathering all the requisite information about the client’s requirement. These phases were:

• Wireframing and creating a prototype
• ER diagram

As planned, DCI provided the wireframe according to the discussed functionality of the mobile application. Once this wireframe was approved by the client, we started working on a functional prototype to ensure that the client’s expectations were met in all ways. 

Phase 2:

The second phase comprised of:

• Development
• Testing
• UAT
• Deploying mobile app to Play Store

Once the functional prototype was approved by the client, DCI started building the database to integrate the prototype into a functional mobile application. We ran tests on every stage to ensure all the bugs were eliminated in the testing stage.

To make sure that the mobile app performs optimally, the team at DCI hosted all the images and videos in a cloud server. So, whenever a request is triggered to play a video or display an image, the details are fetched from the cloud server, delivering optimal performance.

1.4 Results:

The client was extremely happy with the app and proud of the effort put in by DCI to develop a communication platform between teachers and parents. Both the client and DCI are certain that Vidyaura app will revolutionise the education system and play a key part in brightening the future of Indian students.