Professionalising Avans study guides

Objective

At Avans, new study guides are written every year for every (sub) study programme. Drafting these dozens of study guides via Microsoft Word costs the Avans months of time and work, resulting in frustration due to the unclear way of working (together). There appeared to be a lack of clarity about the version management of the documents and the collaboration between employees was difficult and inefficient by email. As a result, there was no good overview of the progress and status of study guides. Furthermore, the approval in the run-up to publication ended up to be a time-consuming task.

Docfield’s solution

In 2016, Docfield developed the OERWrite product in collaboration with Avans to improve and digitise the entire writing process of the study guides. Avans has been using OERWrite for years to write and publish the study guides. This is done in large and small teams and from the streamlined environment of OERWrite. Docfield offered Avans the solution to set up a professional workflow with clear (follow-up) steps that match the way the organisation works.

Why choose Docfield?

1. Build a workflow that fits the organisation

The processes around creating documents can be messy and unclear, but Docfield makes your way of working a success again. Your offline processes can easily be converted into steps of an online workflow. In addition, you can assign the right employees to each step and our software does the rest! We inform and remind your team of outstanding action points and deadlines in every step of the workflow. This enables your team to collaborate more clearly and efficiently. And most importantly: the publication process of study guides is accelerated!

2. The quality and consistency of documents protected by templates

While creating new documents, many errors can sneak into new documents unintentionally and unknowingly. Especially if you are working with several people on different versions of the same document. Docfield reduces this risk in your documents through our tool called ‘single source of truth’. This tool ensures that documents are linked to templates and by making a change to a template, you can edit hundreds of documents with just the click of a button. Thanks to these templates you are assured that the structure, content and styling is consistent across all your documents and contracts.

3. Easy collaboration in (large) teams

Thanks to the versatile roles and rights in our application, you are always in control of who does or sees what. You can tailor the access for users to their function within your organisation or contribution to the workflow. You determine roles and access rights, and assign the right level of authorisation to every person involved in your team.

Also confusing email threads containing different versions of one document are finally a thing of the past. Thanks to Docfield, collaborating on documents has never been easier. From now on you can work online, at the same time and together with your whole team without losing recently written content. Comment on text blocks and tag others for instant feedback.

Gains

Avans study guides are now created with templates that Avans builds itself in OERWrite. This allows all those involved, such as writers, commentators and the participation council, to easily and at the same time contribute to documents in their own way and the content, styling and content of different study guides are coordinated.

Thanks to Docfield, all study guides are archived in one centralized and online location, so relevant content of study guides from previous years is easily imported to the study guides for the new school year. This makes it easy to implement errata in hundreds of study guides with one single click of a button. Consequently, this saves Avans saves hundreds of hours every year in preparing new study guides!