Distance Education App for Sikkim Manipal University

According to the last census, only 11% of the total youth in India between the age group of 15-29 have access to any sort of formal graduate or post graduate education. For a country with 1.2 billion population, that means a staggering number of students are either forced to take up distance education or opt out of formal education all together. Our task was to make a difference to the lives of these people through a distance education program which understands and addresses the issues and challenges faced by the students. We had the task of empowering the students who have been fighting this lone battle of distance education for way too long. We decided to build a learning app for distance education which appreciates and understands the student and his issues. We set off with an initial assumption that poor course content was a detractor to increased adoption, but our user research showed that the biggest challenge faced by the students was in fact that of anxiety. We went back to the drawing board and realised the importance of addressing anxiety needs to be the core around which the app needs to be designed. We introduced interactive features like performance tracker, progress tracker etc. which helped the users gauge how far they have progressed and how much more needs to be done. It also highlights through interactive features, which courses are important and which courses need more attention from the student. This helps in prioritizing the courses and engaging in smart learning. Features like having a quiz to test the progress enables self assessment and gives the user the confidence and the motivation to score higher. We also developed a feature where the student can compete with other students on the app in quizzes which helps in replicating the peer to peer experience which an actual university education provides. We also decided to take the digital app physical with the introduction of ‘meet-ups’. Through this students could form study groups or detect other students in the locality and organize physical meet ups to socialize with peers, get to know them and discuss course material and model papers if required. This app revolutionizes the way distance learning apps are conceived and actually aims to provide a holistic university experience to students rather than just being a provider of study materials.