🧑🔧 What the Meraki and its partners collaboration entails?
Meraki is a free online learning platform for young kids from poor families partnering with schools, NGOs, state governments etc. During and at the end of the programmes, these partners look at progress reports that is maintained by Meraki admins.
🔬 What were the problems requiring Admins to use band-aid solutions to overcome them?
The Operations team admins were managing our partners making sure the students get put into relelvant study batches. They shred that the current partner management dashboard was fine for small partners but it was too difficult to manage partners that have large number of students or have multiple branches across India.
I had some prior insight about this problem from observing the conversations of the admins on our Slack channels. To solidify it, I decided to interview the two admins at that time. The uncovered problem points were:
- For partners with large number of students, admins had to create multiple entries like Partner-Batch-1, Partner-Batch-2 and so on
- Similar band-aid solution was being used for partners with multiple branches giving names like Partner-Location1, Partner-Location2 and so on
- Data collected in the current dashboard had become outdated. Most of the data like study progress, attendance etc. was maintained in excel sheets
Challenges:
- The number of participants was only two admins however our team was small. I compensated this problem with past observations and also asking admins to share feedback from the partners themselves.
- Partner names and student data are sensitive so I cannot share the old screens. In the redesign, I have put filler names
🔬 Why was Meraki interested in solving this problem
Solving the problems would help the admins drop the band-aid solutions and properly create entries for any type of partner - large or small. Additionally, having updated metrics in the dashboard would save a lot of time on maintaining excel sheets manually.
🔮 Was it all worth it?
The developed version is not launched. However, the anticipated impact is:
- Admins will not be using band-aid solutions to properly represent the partners in the system
- Saving valuable employee time and thereby costs in maintaining multiple metric excel sheets manually
🕵️ So, what ideas helped to solve the problems?
The larger idea was to provide a flexible partner management dashboard that allowed the admins to:
- Create workspaces for partners whether they had small or large number of students and whether they had single branch or multiple branches across India
- Capture relevant data on progress, status and attendance and be able to download reports to share with the partners
Task 1: Creating partner workspaces and batches for the added students
Admins can handle partners that have a single branch, multiple branches and have either small or large number of students at any of the branches. The added students are a group for which a batch can be created for any course on Meraki.
Task 2: Monitoring student progress, status and attendance
Admins can check student progress, attendance and status and make adjustments.
💡 What did the students say during testing and reception upon launch?
- In testing, the participants expressed joy at the ease of use and not having to enrol in the classes again and again for both regular and revision classes
- Upon launch, the immediate feedback by both students and teachers were positive as it saved their time. The active user numbers grew to 17k+ in the next few months. Usually, we had around 4k to 5k active users before this change