An integral part of The Learn Together Foundation, Humsaath is a project that seeks to help parents gain a more comprehensive understanding of their child’s academic performance and progress from the comfort of their homes by simply using their mobile phones. This would enable parents from low-income families to be more deeply involved in their child’s education by facilitating effective and efficient communication between key stakeholders. The project endeavours to develop a simple mobile application for the target demographic of low-income families in India, allowing them to learn more about their child’s school performance and communicate easily with teachers. Additionally, the application may also be used by teachers to track student attendance, participation, and overall progress, and report assignment grades, ensuring effective communication between parents and school administrators. 

The roadmap for the project consists of three stages, of which the first is to gain a comprehensive understanding of key stakeholders’ needs and requirements via original primary research. Two original surveys were developed to gain in-depth insights into preferences, requirements, and expectations of teachers and parents, respectively, by collecting primary data to inform creation of the Humsaath application. In May 2022, the ‘Teacher Survey’ was administered to teachers at five schools in India which primarily catered to students belonging to low-income families. At the same time, the ‘Parent Survey’ was administered to parents of students studying at the same five schools. 

The survey questions were originally created in English and translated to Hindi to facilitate greater access and reach a wider sample. The Teacher Survey consisted of 9 questions and the Parent Survey consisted of 8 questions, with key questions including feedback on participants’ expectations for the application and how it could be designed in a simplified manner that would be easy to use and understand. A total of 691 parent responses were received, and 82 teacher responses. The survey data summary is provided below:

Parent Survey (691 responses)

1. The first survey question aimed to investigate the digital infrastructure available to parents, and results showed that the majority of parents (68.2%) had access to a smartphone, and uninterrupted internet access that would facilitate their use of the mobile application. 
2. The second question aimed to understand the digital capabilities of participants, enquiring about their comfort with using a mobile application. While only 54.1% of respondents answered ‘yes,’ another 31% stated that they would be willing to learn. This insight can be factored into the design and user interface of the application to address ease of adoption. 
3. The third question aimed to gauge perceived usefulness of the tool by asking participants whether they felt that knowing their child’s daily attendance record would prove helpful. An overwhelming majority (89.6%) of respondents stated that this information would constitute an extremely useful feature of the application. 
4. The fourth survey question asked parents if they wished to be kept abreast of their ward’s weekly academic progress, and 71.9% of respondents indicated ‘yes,’ registering it as a useful feature to include in the application’s offerings. 
5. The fifth and sixth questions revealed a trend wherein surveyed respondents appeared to be more concerned about overall academic performance and change in academic performance over time, as compared to regular, smaller updates regarding academic progress. 66% of respondents agreed that it would be useful to view scanned copies of their children’s test and examination papers in each academic subject, while an overwhelming majority (98.8%) of parents believed that it would be useful to see a record of their child’s performance over time. Further, there seemed to be a fairly even distribution of parents who felt it was important to receive academic updates in the form of either homework assignments (84.1%) or upcoming tests or examinations (81.8%). These results indicate that parents might wish to be kept in the loop regarding their children’s academic lives, particularly with regards to work that needs to be done at home and overseen by them; including the completion of homework assignments or studying for upcoming tests and examinations. 

Teacher Survey (82 Responses)

1. The first question of the teacher survey aimed to address the primary concern with the introduction of a mobile application to address communicative and logistical concerns in parent-teacher relationships. 95.1% of teachers surveyed indicated that they would be comfortable using a mobile application for such a purpose, recognizing it as a viable route for the target demographic.
2. When asked if they would be comfortable updating the application to display records for each student on a monthly basis, 85.2% of teachers surveyed responded in the affirmative. This was supported by results from parent responses which showed that a greater percentage of them wanted reports of their children’s academic performance over time, as opposed to smaller, frequent updates. A smaller percentage of teachers (13.6%) believed that fortnightly updates would also be possible.
3. When asked if teachers felt like they could meaningfully, and objectively, assess student class participation, not a single respondent answered ‘no.’ A large majority (85.2%) said that they would be capable of this, while the remaining 14.8% responded that they would be able to perform this kind of assessment some of the time. These are especially promising figures in the consideration of quality and parity of instructional ability. 
4. In line with this, results from the next survey question displayed that 100% of respondents kept a record of homework assignments submitted. Furthermore, almost all (96.3%) of the 82 respondents stated that they also recorded students’ academic performance in these homework assignments. 
5. When asked if they kept a record of important administrative information such as fee payments, holiday notices, and important school events, 74.1% of the respondents answered ‘no,’ while only 23.5% said that they sometimes did. A very low percentage of respondents (2.4%) answered ‘yes’ to this question. This could perhaps be attributed to the fact that record-keeping of this kind might fall outside the ambit of individual teachers’ job profiles — manifesting as more administrative responsibilities. This could bear consequences for the features the application will offer or the stakeholders it will include; either by excluding this category or by including contributors who are privy to, and often engage with, this information such as school administration.
6. 84% of respondents said that they typically communicated with their students’ parents once every two months. If read in tandem with the question regarding how often teachers would be comfortable updating the app, it becomes clear that teachers would like more regular reporting and involvement from parents, further displaying the need for the application to streamline this process. This is supported by a startling 98.6% of teachers stating that they would prefer increased parental involvement in their children’s curricular and co-curricular activities. 
7. Lastly, most of the respondents (86.4%) say that they would be comfortable employing a mobile app to facilitate increased and effective communication with parents. This insight is important as it takes into account stakeholder comfort with regard to the adoption and implementation of new technological systems, which, in turn, has implications for the efficiency and effectiveness with which the application might be used.  

For the second stage of the project, we partnered with Edumagix, an integrated information technology platform engaged in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for schools and universities, to implement the outcome of the survey. The survey informed the updation of their existing ERP software, ‘Edumagix 2.0,’ introducing significant changes including:

1. Technological Shift: The previous application was developed in Java and Swift for Android and iOS respectively, but the new application was developed in a hybrid technology, Flutter, in an effort to make operations and support more streamlined and efficient.
2. Design Changes: The application design was tweaked to simplify the user interface and make it user-friendly so that those with a lower level of education would be comfortable in using the application.
3. Redundancy Elimination: A few existing features of the application that complicated ease of use and were primarily unused were removed from the interface. 
4. Addition of New Features: A new feature was added which enabled learning from home for specific assignments via educational videos and quizzes.
5. Division of App:  The previous application was a singular application. The newer version was split into two — Edumagix Parent and Edumagix Teacher. 

The new and improved application has been introduced in the schools which primarily cater to children from economically weaker sections of society. 

In the third stage, we are obtaining regular feedback from stakeholders, both parents and teachers, at these schools to improve the quality of content offered by the application at regular intervals, as well as to ensure that the application remains up-to-date with evolving needs and preferences of key stakeholders. With this, we hope to create an effective, two-way communication channel that enables parents to be deeply involved in their children’s education, with the hope of promoting a holistic educational experience for all.