Automating operational reporting for a large-scale education program

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many education programs were forced to move online almost overnight. For NGOs running at-scale interventions, this shift wasn’t just about delivering content — it was about maintaining visibility into learning outcomes without adding unsustainable operational load.

As part of the Avanti Sankalp at-home learning program in Haryana, teachers were sharing interactive learning modules (Plios) with students on a daily basis. Students engaged with these Plios, answered questions, and generated rich engagement data.

The next challenge was clear:

How do teachers receive timely, reliable feedback on student learning — every day — without the program depending on manual coordination?

The operational reality before automation

Initially, learning reports were generated from Plio’s engagement data and shared manually by Avanti’s operations team.

While this worked at a smaller scale, it quickly became fragile:

• Reports had to be generated daily
• Accuracy mattered — teachers acted on this information
• Manual effort did not scale with growing adoption
• Delays or errors directly affected program effectiveness

The workflow existed.
The problem was reliability.

Designing a reporting loop that could scale

Plio was already capturing detailed engagement events — video watch time, quiz responses, accuracy — and storing them in BigQuery as part of its analytics stack.

The task was not to “add analytics,” but to turn existing data into a dependable operational loop.

This raised a more fundamental question:

How do you turn raw engagement data into something teachers can depend on every single day?

To answer this, the focus shifted to:

• Identifying the right reporting granularity (teacher × grade × plio)
• Aggregating engagement data daily into stable reporting tables
• Ensuring reports could be regenerated consistently without manual intervention

BigQuery routines were used to process raw engagement data and generate daily summary tables that reflected each teacher’s cohort accurately.

Integrating last-mile delivery through WhatsApp

Generating reports was only part of the solution.

The more practical question was:

How do those insights reach teachers in a way that fits their daily work?

Teachers were already using WhatsApp as a primary communication channel. To meet them where they were, Plio’s reporting outputs were integrated with Glific — an open-source, WhatsApp-based communication platform built by ColoredCow, for Tech4Dev, to support large-scale social programs.

Using Glific:

• Reports were fetched programmatically based on teacher identifiers
• Custom flows processed the data into teacher-specific messages
• Scheduled triggers ensured reports were delivered automatically each day
• Teachers received concise, actionable summaries directly on WhatsApp

This replaced a manual, error-prone process with a predictable, automated workflow.

What changed as a result

With this integration in place:

• Teachers received consistent, daily learning feedback
• Avanti’s operations team was freed from manual reporting work
• Data correctness became enforceable through system design
• The program could scale without increasing coordination cost

Learning data moved from being informational to operational.

Why this work mattered

This was not a dashboarding exercise.

It surfaced a broader question relevant to many social-sector platforms:

When does data stop being informational and start becoming operational?

In this case, the answer was clear:
when teachers began to rely on it daily to understand student progress and adjust instruction.

This work demonstrated how:

• Live programs depend on reliable systems, not ad-hoc coordination
• Analytics only create value when tied to real workflows
• Automation must respect existing human processes
• Multiple platforms must work together under daily operational cadence

For ColoredCow, this reflected a recurring pattern of work:
helping mission-critical systems move from “humanly manageable” to “operationally reliable.”

Looking ahead

Avanti Fellows is now extending this reporting pipeline to generate detailed PDF reports, stored automatically in cloud storage and delivered to teachers over WhatsApp — further strengthening the feedback loop between learning activity and instructional action.