HAN saves 1000s of hours yearly on the OER process

The OER, Education and Examination Regulations, is a crucial document within higher education. This contains all conditions, teaching and examination programs for the students. Every educational institute must annually prepare an OER for all its programs and program variants.

These are extensive documents involving multiple departments and (legal) advisors. For most educational institutes it takes a lot of time to create an OER. The process is often not efficiently organised and writing is usually done via Microsoft Word, supplemented with other communication systems such as Outlook & Teams, project management via Excel lists and storage + version management via Sharepoint or Dropbox.

The old OER process

At the HAN University of Applied Sciences, each OER had its own process. Each document had to be edited separately by several writers and then checked or approved by various stakeholders – lawyers, employee participation, management. As a result, an infinite amount of feedback and all kinds of versions flew through the mailboxes. In addition, OERs from previous years were not stored centrally and were often difficult to find, especially if you were also looking for the right version to edit. When the OER was finally published, this was done through yet another department (Communication) that published the documents on the website. And in the event of a change in a published OER, this whole process was repeated over and over again.

More than 300 OERs are written every year at HAN. It previously took as much as 124 hours to create one single OER and it often took up to 6 months before it was published.

The new OER process

This process could be done faster, better and smarter. And so, the HAN has been working with Docfield since 2018. Our collaboration allowed the HAN to easily create, collaborate and publish documents from one streamlined environment.

Hence, the HAN can now create their own workflow for each type of OER. This gives the coordinators an overview of the entire writing process. Furthermore, the writers have more control over their content because they work with our smart templates. And so, also the writers make far fewer mistakes as they are always working together on the same version of an OER.

The communication between different teams and advisors is also much improved. All relevant people can post comments and receive email notifications about this. This keeps everyone informed of the progress of the writing process and the outstanding points are clear.

At the HAN they now also work in this way with their student contracts. The tutors write educational agreements and thousands of students sign this agreement directly in the same environment.

This year, half of all HAN academies have written their 136 OERs using Docfield. Together we have calculated that this means that they spend 66% less time on writing and publishing the OER. As a result, HAN has already saved more than 11,000 hours in the past year by working differently. As of 2021, the other half of HAN will also start working in this new way, doubling this time saving!