Zidyia: Acceleration to the learning journey

Zidyia provides all of the tools for teachers and students to accelerate their learning journey, but the challenge that is proposed here is something that most LMS’s lack which is providing useful analytics on the student/teacher side. Analytics are categorized by different types of users where students see certain types of data while teachers see another set of data and tenant admins see the overall data.

Take for example a teacher working for a university - How will the university know if this teacher is competent or not and whether this teacher is providing all of the material on time? Also, another example is the analytic of a certain activity like a quiz – Which questions from this quiz were students able to solve easily, and which questions took the students a lot of time to complete? Even more, what is the average time a student takes to complete a quiz?

Zidyia provides these analytics for every user to help them make useful decisions in relation to the learning journey, be it a managerial decision or otherwise.

Amazon DynamoDB operates as the database of choice for Zidyia. By utilizing the Single Table Design on DynamoDB, each tenant on Zidyia has their own dedicated DynamoDB table that contains all of their corresponding data, where each tenant doesn’t have visibility nor access to other tenants’ data.

Analytics are provided in two ways: general analytics and specific purpose analytics. General analytics are collected through AWS Pinpoint which gets streamed to a datalake on S3 using Kinesis Firehose. This datalake gets crawled by AWS Glue, which will generate a catalog that gets loaded on AWS Redshift Serverless, which then gets visualized using Quicksight.

Specific purpose analytics are provided when data is inserted into DynamoDB. Using DynamoDB streams and AWS Lambda, this specific purpose data is inserted into Redshift Serverless as a record that would get displayed on the admin section, teacher dashboard, or student dashboard using Quicksight.

Utilizing CDK, we can create the same environment with all of the right out of the box configurations for all environments.

Zero&One strives at becoming an extension of the IT team at our customers. In doing so, we not only concentrated on the traditional Managed Services offerings but also actively engaged with their technical team and conducted a number of upskilling sessions for their teams in order to familiarize them with the solution and design an optimal way of working; especially as they pertain to CDK since this was a new technology for them. During this process, we on-boarded their development and production teams onto our Managed Services platform, allowing them to raise tickets 24/7 for any issues that arose during their deployment.

Through our Monthly Reports and Service Reviews we actively monitored their financial returns and benefits that were being realized through the implementation of the solution and the continued enhancement through are active infrastructure and solution recommendations.

The solution enabled Zidyia to provide accurate analytics for their institution through which they defined student performance, activity performance, and quiz performance. This helped to shape the way they managed the students’ course activities and quizzes, which were now based on historical and data. This allowed them to reduce the time spent on assigned courses and quizzes by 50%. The solution also allowed them to predict current and future student count more accurately, which allowed them the achieve 15% in over operating cost reduction due better management of teacher assignments and equipment usage which was previously over capacity. Lastly, this also allowed them to better manage courses in which interest was low earlier, reducing last minute cancellations (counted as courses cancelled within 24hours of their start date) by 60%. Through these savings, Zidiya is expecting to achieve a full ROI in 18 months.