Building a comprehensive Schooling solution with Zoho Creator

For the latest installment of #JustLowCodeIt, we've got Tactick, a partner based out of Netherlands, sharing how they solved their customer's problem using Zoho Creator.

This blog was written by Albert Jan Schouten, founder and business consultant at Tactick, as part of the Creator Developers' Month initiative. Thank you for sharing your story with us!

The partner & company

As a Zoho Premium Partner from The Netherlands, Tactick was approached by an EduTech startup to help them create a "school environment" in Zoho. This EduTech startup, New Care College, educates people who want to work in healthcare as a nursing professional. The challenge and goal for this company was to have a very modern and digital customer journey.

A little background

The first part of the challenge was a recruitment journey for new students. The second part, which was the core, was to facilitate a digital environment for students to follow their studies.

For the first part of the journey, we used Zoho CRM to create a recruitment and onboarding process. Several fancy custom-developed third-party integrations where built—like a WhatsApp widget where you can communicate to potential students, and a Mollie (payment provider) integration for the invoicing part. When the potential student pays, we onboard this student to the School application built on Zoho Creator. Keep in mind, these kinds of solutions are all possible from within Zoho Creator: even widgets and connecting to third-party APIs.

Schooling solution within Zoho Creator

We created this School application in Zoho Creator because we needed a portal where students could track progress, and see their schedule, lessons, subjects, teachers, and so on. Maybe a picture will give a better idea of what we mean:

This is the homepage, where the student can navigate quickly to important links and items, like a calendar with their own schedule. On the left, you can also see what kind of tables/forms were used to create this application. Measure twice, cut once!

We came up with this structure together with the customer in a brainstorming session, and defined all the objects and relations. You can see items like: Homepage, Scheduled lessons, Students, Classes, Assignments, Teaching Materials, Lessons, Courses, Teachers, and more. The student portal gives some access to their own courses, materials, and grade list.

Lessons learned

What we always do when we implement an application is define the processes and database. Like we said earlier: Measure twice, cut once! But of course, we did also learn and develop on the way when building the app. We try to create a user-friendly homepage when facilitating a customer portal—one that fits both the client's requirements and their budget. In this case, this startup was able to configure a whole school app in several months.

So, how did Zoho Creator help New Care College? It offered them a solution for portal access for students, the possibility to create their own application that fit their specific needs, a short implementation lead time, and it was very budget friendly! They now have a platform for their (digital) future.

Throughout this month, we'll be bringing you more interesting stories, so keep checking back and help celebrate International Programmers' Day with us!