Challenge at hand

Anthropology Department students were supposed to conduct surveys as part of their academic curriculum. The department encountered several difficulties with its manual paper-based process, and questions existed about the data's reliability. The major issues faced are listed below:

  • Ineffectiveness:

    There has always been a problem in assessing the effectiveness of data gathered by surveyors, in this case, students, through questionnaires in a select group.

  • Lack of transparency:

    It was not clear if the surveyors were truthful. It could be that they answered the questions themselves, making the results irrelevant.

  • Time-consuming:

    Manually conducting a survey included collecting and collating the data in a set pattern. It resulted in considerable wastage of time and effort.

  • Data Preservation:

    Hard Copies of data were prone to damage in the long run and could also be misplaced.

  • Erroneous Results:

    Because of the possibility of error in manual entries, the results were always questionable.

Proposed Solution

We developed a Web portal and an Android mobile App for the Anthropology Department to facilitate the entire survey life-cycle. The Android tablet app supports offline mode helping students capture the survey information against the questionnaire. When internet connectivity is available, it synchronizes the data. By utilizing offline support, students can conduct surveys in remote areas without a network. Additionally, the app captures the geo-location of the survey.

While the Android app facilitates conducting the survey, the portal enables extracting the results. The portal provides a consolidated dashboard for results through a secure login module to ensure access to eligible users. It also allows to drill-down through the results and sort or filter based on various criteria.