Open Source E-learning Platform for Maternity Healthcare

About the Customer

Aastrika foundation is an initiative by Nilekani Philanthropies with focus on implementing high quality maternity care. The foundation runs an education platform ‘Aastrika Sphere’ with the objective of educating stakeholders of midwifery and maternity care. The platform hosts content from partners like UNFPA, Maternity Foundation, Fernandez Foundation , White Ribbon Alliance and many more. Doctors, Nurses, midwives and ASHA are the prime beneficiary of this platform.

Overview

Tarento worked as a technology partner with Aastrika Foundation. Tarento’s expertise with Sunbird allowed us to leverage it to develop solutions for country scale initiatives. This has been already demonstrated with PoC of the UN Foundation for Smart Africa using the same stack.

Tarento as the partner of choice

Aastrika Foundation partnered with Tarento for technology development and maintenance of their education platform Aastrika Sphere. Tarento provided the development skills and expertise with the sunbird platform to build and modify it as per the foundation’s needs.

Tarento implemented Sunbird and helped the foundation launch its initial courses during the pandemic. The journey still continues as the team learns from Foundation’s field work to improve platform adoption across the country.

Challenges

Aastrika foundation’s use case was to leverage open source technology to build a highly scalable platform to support the foundation training initiative - Aastrika Sphere. The concept was evolving with the team still working on the best solution set to attract partners and users. The development scope was solution oriented and for the initial 12 months it was all about quick solutions and experimentations.

As the platform grew, partners came up with a set of requirements from the platform. In addition to this, with time, user segments shifted across different spectrum adding to the complexity of the project.

Solution

Aastrika Foundation understood the task and complexity of the project and had great trust in Tarento on its execution capabilities. While the foundation’s team interacted with partners and users to create a feedback and priority mechanism, Tarento worked on understanding the sunbird platform to find solutions that create continuous value for stakeholders.

Some of the quick tour-arounds have been implementation of validated credentialing for certificates, Custom authentication mechanism and Integration of Fusion UI with headless Sunbird. The teams continue to work together in enhancing the experience for all users of the platform. The team started with 3 people and has grown to over 10 people.

Outcomes

The foundation has over 10 partners on the platform with over 7000 users having taken training on the platform in the past 18 months. The platform supports continuing education credits of the nursing council and has been used by doctors, nurses, midwives and asha workers all over the country. The foundation and Tarento created a build measure loop to continuously deliver updates to the platform and improve user experience.