How CollPoll and AWS enables universities and other educational institutions become digital, contactless and safe

A recent report by the World Economic Forum reveals that globally, over 1.2 billion students in 186 countries are affected by the closure of educational institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation isn’t too different for India’s 20-million-odd college students who are served by 700 universities and over 35,000 affiliated colleges, nor is it any different for the 300 million children across 1.4 million schools in the country.

The pandemic has also left a growing number of educational institutions struggling to transition from traditional transaction-management and record-keeping enterprise resource planners (ERPs) to open, collaborative and AI-based technologies to achieve deeper, across-the-board digital transformation, with safety as the top-most priority.

To help colleges and other educational institutions become digital, contactless and safe, CollPoll, a Bangalore-based edutech company, offers educational institutions a comprehensive mobile-first enterprise suite of over 40 technologies to boost learning outcomes and enhance the student experience. CollPoll goes beyond a traditional ERP for a deeper digital transformation of academics as well as operations with a bundled solution that includes core ERP for administration, academic and learning management system, an AI-proctored digital examination system, a workflow automation engine, and a campus social network solution to drive engagement.

During the Covid lockdown period, CollPoll helped thousands of students and teachers move to a virtual learning environment by providing a learning management system which not only integrates video conferencing tools like Zoom and Google Meet, but also engages students via live quizzes, discussion forums and polls. CollPoll also supported institutions in conducting their examinations and admission tests to ensure the continuity of academics as well as the admission process. Many institutions have also adopted CollPoll’s cashless campus solution which allows collection of fees and other financial dues digitally.

Most institutions are expecting to reopen their campuses in September. To help colleges and other educational institutions become contactless and safe, CollPoll has devised a Campus Help Centre (CHC) solution which is an adaptive workflow automation engine. The CHC empowers all the operations of educational institutions, be it academics, hostels, security or transportation, by creating a virtual workplace where members have access to services, and administrators can take appropriate actions as per institutional policies and processes. The workflows can be tracked in real-time to ensure transparency and have an auto-escalation functionality for accountability. Senior leaders have access to analytics to measure efficiency and productivity of different functions in the institution.

Why outdated ERP systems don’t make the cut anymore

The problem with traditional ERPs is that they are transactional in nature. They are impersonal and offer rigid solutions that are not easily customisable.

“That is why we saw the need to begin CollPoll. We wanted to build a holistic platform that not only offered all the functionalities of an ERP for running an educational institution, but also to provide a learning community where students, faculty, and staff can engage, collaborate and communicate more efficiently,” says Hemant Sahal, Founder and CEO of CollPoll.

The larger the institution, the greater the variety and complexity of processes needed to operate efficiently. As a result, the design, implementation, and management of organisational workflows is critical. Unless this is carefully done, it can lead to a needless escalation in capital and operational expenses. The proper design of workflows also requires the elimination of silos that often plague organisations, as departments work at cross purposes and deliberately keep their internal operational details opaque. This frequently leads to miscommunication, errors of omission and commission, and worst of all, conflict among personnel.

Since the launch of CHC, CollPoll has automated more than 1,000 workflows across all kinds of educational institutions that have helped them to improve learning outcomes, achieve academic excellence, automate workflows in every function to boost efficiency and productivity, break silos to make communication easy, cut down administrative costs and comply with government regulations.

Powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading cloud platform

Given the unprecedented need for the solution and the scope for it to scale, CollPoll has been on AWS from day one. And it’s not hard to see why. At the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, AWS offers over 175 fully-featured services from data centres globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

CollPoll also recently launched its AI-proctored digital examination system that leverages AWS Image processing technologies for virtual invigilation. The solution has received a great response so far from partner institutions, particularly those who were forced to go online due to the lockdown. CollPoll saw a huge surge in usage of their learning management system and AWS Lambda helped them deliver at scale.

“For us, the most important benefit has been the ability to scale up quickly. Over 1.2 million feedback points have been collected, over 250K assignments and quizzes have been conducted, and over five million online activities have happened on CollPoll platform as of June 2020. Our complete tech stack from the application, to database, storage, monitoring and security is on AWS. We started on AWS and never felt a need to look at any other provider. As tech companies, we must focus on what is core to us – build delightful products that solve a real problem of our customers. The last thing we should be managing is the infrastructure. AWS does that very well,” says Hemant.

How to create a digitally-enabled campus: the webinar

AWS, in collaboration with CollPoll, is organising a webinar to highlight the roadmap for educational institutions to migrate from legacy software to all-connected mobile-first, cloud-secured and data-driven modern enterprise solution that transforms every campus process to go digital.

Topic: Digital Campus on Cloud for Education

Featuring leaders from the ecosystem like Dr. Mahesh Goudar, Director, MIT Academy of Engineering, Pune; Karan Kumar, Head - IT, OP Jindal Global University; Durga Prasad Kakaraparthi, Manager, Solutions Architect, Amazon Internet Services and Hemant Sahal, Founder & CEO, CollPoll, the webinar will cover end-to-end campus solutions including admission systems, examinations, campus management, hostel management, online classes, fees management, placement management, infrastructure and inventory management and the art of campus innovation.

Register here to watch the free webinar.