We are Live and Open for Admissions! (#12)

You know how last week I implied that this week would be a pretty special one for Team Avinya? Well, it’s been that and more!

We ran the last stretch of testing our Admissions system and are now extremely happy to report that admissions are now open for our very first Avinya Academy in… Bandaragama. For more details on this incredible feat which is in partnership with the Sarvodaya Institute of Higher Learning please see the announcement blog post. 


As you know it’s been an incredible journey to get here. Lots of ups and downs, caves, tunnels and then light!

We had our own internal deadlines and wanted this out earlier but we didn’t want something out there that we weren’t completely happy with. So to make sure we could have a system that is exactly what we need, we realized we needed to take our time with it. The good news is the time has come!


“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.” Karl Wiegers


Quality is what we want to have at the forefront of our minds. Quality in what we offer our students from end to end. Now we start the rigorous process to find the first 120 students for the 2023 academic year. Such exciting times ahead!


Apart from admissions, we’ve been working on many other things this week. Primarily, our communications strategy, website, marketing content and content for stakeholders who would like to contribute to Avinya’s vision and purpose. It’s been a lot of brainstorming, re-evaluating concepts and coming to a consensus. There’s still a lot more work to do here but we are chipping away as we go along and making things work slowly and steadily (but at supersonic speed ;)) 


We have a lot of things we need to procure for our first school which is being built as I write this. The whole team went down to Bandaragama last Friday to take a firsthand look at the construction. Within four days, the site had been transformed into mounds of earth, steel structures were coming up in some places already where they’d managed to get a head start on and the entire area was buzzing with accelerated activity. Which made me reflect, maybe we at Avinya just love giving ourselves very tight deadlines :)


Lots of other things have been going on too!


Here’s an update from Dee about what our team of Educators have been up to this week.


We have officially kicked off our PBL training this week. We even had our advisor Mrs. Fernando join us in the classroom for a session. 


It’s been a week of brainstorming, spelling races, jigsaw readings, poster making, role playing, video comprehension and a whole lot of reflection. The teachers have also completed their own run on Google’s Interland where they have conquered the skills of netiquette and how to pass on these skills to the students. 


We also had yet another crack at our Curriculum Framework and we are now almost at the finish line. We are in the process of reevaluating our Project choices (aren’t we always?) 


We’ve also explored the teaching skills for the team of educators, we looked at what is different when evaluating PBL teachers and how we can incorporate this into our context.







Needless to say, it’s not only been a busy week but a monumental one at that. Admissions are live and now we can share with you all where our very first Avinya Academy will be situated! 


We have specific admission requirements as we want to ensure that the Academy gives preference to local students (i.e. students within a reasonable travel distance from the Academy’s location). We will apply this same requirement for all our Academies as we scale up. Visit our revamped website for more information on this. 


We hope you will join us in celebrating this great milestone! It’s a new chapter for us at Team Avinya and we are so excited to share this news with you all!


Have a great week everyone!

- Anju

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