Simplifying Teacher Evaluations and Data Management with PowerApps for a Non-Profit in the Education Sector

About the client

The client is a US-based national non-profit organization founded by teachers, who work alongside the educators they serve in schools and district offices.


Client challenges

The organization faced several critical challenges related to their teacher evaluation process, which required a more flexible and automated system.

  • Their existing WordPress-based system lacked the scalability and flexibility needed to support evolving functionalities.
  • A significant amount of manual intervention was required to generate static questionnaires for assignments based on variables like student grade and subject.
  • The organization struggled to gather and analyze data from multiple sources, often resorting to Excel for data management, which proved to be inefficient and cumbersome when managing large datasets.
Solution

PreludeSys transitioned the client from their WordPress application to a comprehensive solution built using PowerApps, significantly enhancing the system’s scalability and functionality.

  • A Model-Driven Application was developed for admin users, providing them with the flexibility to manage the system more effectively. Power Automate flows were implemented to automate the onboarding process, including sending invitations to new users.
  • A Portal application was created to handle the teacher rating functionality, integrating with Power Automate flows to move data between SharePoint and the system for easier collaboration and data management.
  • To simplify access control, Power Automate flows were designed to automatically add users from Azure Active Directory security roles to the contact table, ensuring appropriate access levels within the portal.
  • The manual creation of questionnaires was eliminated by implementing a dynamic Power Automate flow that generates questionnaires based on student grade and subject. Responses to these questionnaires were seamlessly saved into the Dataverse table, making data analysis much more manageable.
Benefits

By migrating to PowerApps and incorporating automation through Power Automate, the client realized several key benefits:

  • Process automation reduced manual tasks, particularly in questionnaire generation, allowing staff to focus on more value-driven work.
  • The new system improved data security, safeguarding sensitive information while ensuring the correct access levels for different users.
  • Increased productivity was achieved through the reduction of manual intervention, allowing the organization to handle more data without the previous bottlenecks caused by their WordPress system.
  • Data validation and assignment reviews became much easier, and the organization now has a scalable, dynamic solution that meets their evolving needs.
Technology
  • PowerApps
  • Power Automate
  • Dataverse
  • SharePoint