How Raise Learning Elevates Early Childhood Education With Low-Code

Going to school is an adventure.

And much like when our favorite heroes and heroines embark on a quest, the youngest among us should be primed when they begin their journey into school — guided by parents and teachers who serve as wizened mentors.

It takes a village to raise a child, after all.

Raise Learning of Australia is making sure this parent-teacher collaboration happens. They’re using Caspio’s low-code platform to prepare children for upcoming adventures.

Schedule a free consultation to see how Caspio helps educators build custom database applications without coding.

Spreading Early Childhood Education Across Australia

As of 2017, almost 49% of Australian children aged 0 to 12 have participated in some form of early learning before starting full-time school. That’s two million young minds that could change society for the better when they grow up.

Ensuring these children are ready for formal school is the mission of Raise Learning.  

Established in 2010, Raise Learning is a premier provider of tools, training and services that aim to improve the quality of early childhood education in Australia. Their services primarily help educators improve teaching outcomes.

At the heart of their operations is LIFT — an online application that enables providers of early childhood education services to manage their data and collaborate with families. Having been operational for over 10 years now, LIFT has helped countless educators and families work together online to better prepare youngsters for formal education.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

Moving to the Cloud for Data Management

Prior to working with Caspio, Raise Learning struggled to find a solution that could support their mission to improve early childhood education across Australia. The company needed some form of online database solution or spreadsheet that they could use to manage data from multiple locations.

“Data could be observations of children, photographs of families, or it could be reporting or quality management,” notes Natalie Higgins, owner and director of Raise Learning.

Bringing their services online would also open up collaboration between educators and families — a critical component in the success of early childhood education initiatives.

“We knew that we had to get into the cloud, we had to get our processes online. Our local Microsoft Access solution just wasn’t able to deliver that,” says Higgins.

That changed when they found Caspio.

Fostering Collaboration Between Parents and Teachers

Using Caspio’s low-code development platform, Raise Learning built a fully-featured application that enabled all parties to securely record and share information online, including photos and observations of children’s development. Families can also contribute ideas that educators can use to customize learning programs.

The consolidation of all these datapoints has made it easier for families to get involved in their child’s development.

On the side of education providers, LIFT simplifies and automates unnecessary administrative tasks that can consume a teacher’s time and distract them from their real purpose. The application has features for quality improvement plans or QIP management, incident management, staff development and more. Educators can also access up to 25,000 curriculum ideas they can use for their program.

Giving Educators a Scalable and Secure Tool

“When I joined Caspio, there weren’t any other solutions. Caspio was the only one,” recalls Higgins. While many other low-code platforms have emerged since then, Raise Learning decided to stick with Caspio for a number of reasons, with scalability being the main one.

“We’ve got thousands of users now and Caspio has been quite seamless in their transition.”

Natalie Higgins
Owner/Director
Raise Learning

Higgins also liked how Caspio allows them to quickly deploy new ideas. “There’s very little time between having a new concept and then bringing it into our application.”

And since they deal with data related to children, Raise Learning also ensures their tools meet government regulations and recommendations.

Apart from complying with the Australian Privacy Law, their LIFT application also works around the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), a key component of the National Quality Framework for early childhood education. EYLF is a collection of best practices and principles that aim to give children “learning that is engaging and builds success for life.”

Passion for Continuous Improvement and Support

Higgins and her team continuously improve the LIFT app as Caspio launches new updates. She describes Caspio’s passion for continuous improvement as “exactly in line with my own values.”

“I’m pretty much seeing a new feature, or a new item being added almost on a monthly basis. It’s regularly changing. There’s always new improvements, which is fantastic,” Higgins says.

And anytime they encounter concerns too challenging to resolve on their own, they simply call and get help from Caspio’s support team. “I love that the Caspio support team are quickly responding to issues.”

Low-Code Platform, High-Quality Education

Caspio provides secure data management for academic institutions and educational nonprofits. Embraced by business professionals for ease of use, the Caspio platform enables educators to build their own online database applications without coding.

Collin College of Texas, which orients around 7,000 new students each year, used to drown in the processing of paper forms that were often lost, submitted to the wrong department or missed deadlines. Using Caspio, they built secure online forms that centralized student data and replaced their outdated paper processes.

Seeds of Hope, an educational nonprofit that has provided $35 million in financial assistance to families to date, struggled to calculate grants for their growing number of scholars. With Caspio, they custom-built a tuition right-sizing tool that enabled them to quickly estimate grants and scale their needs-based scholarship model.

And in the case of Raise Learning, they created an application that enabled parents and teachers to collaborate for the improvement of early childhood education across Australia.

You, too, can help your educational institution better manage data and streamline processes with the help of low-code. Talk to us and discover the possibilities with Caspio.