First experience of Hogeschool Utrecht

Context

For years, compiling study guides was a labor-intensive and vulnerable process at Hogeschool Utrecht (HU), involving many contacts, writers, text versions, and frustrations. The implementation of Docfield made this process much more user-friendly. The first study guides have now been created and HU recently wrote the blog "How does the app perform in practice?" According to HU, Docfield's OER Write is a transparent system, and the user experience and key benefits mentioned in the blog are set out below:

HU user experience with Docfield

One of the first users is Jennifer van Triest. "It is a huge improvement over how it was. It’s not an enhanced Word or pdf version, it's a completely separate system, entirely tailored to what is needed for creating study guides, without unnecessary features. I used to have a bunch of Word documents that I sometimes had to scroll through endlessly, which took a lot of time. Now it's much clearer. You can see at a glance what's done and what's not. And if you have to make multiple guides, you can easily transfer pieces." Leonie Verheijen, secretary at the Institute for Finance & Accounting, is also satisfied. "It's really a great tool for the study guides, I'm enthusiastic!"

"I used to have a bunch of Word documents that I sometimes had to scroll through endlessly, which took a lot of time. Now it's much clearer. You can see at a glance what's done and what's not."

^{- Jennifer van Triest | secretary at the Institute for People & Business}

Why did HU choose Docfield?

1. Easy, transparent collaboration

One of the big advantages is simple collaboration, says Jennifer. "If I have a question about a certain piece of text, I can send a message directly to the responsible person from within the program. They then receive an email to alert them that there's a question open. If he or she then responds, I get another email. You know when something is resolved and you can continue, without having to keep checking back in the program. People can respond to each other very easily and the entire conversation is visible to everyone."

Jennifer: "I also like that I can easily add users myself and provide them with the appropriate rights. You can specify exactly who can change things themselves, who can only comment, etc." Leonie agrees. "All process steps are clearly indicated and all communication is visible to everyone. Examination Committee, GOC, educational managers; they can easily comment. We can in turn show the GOC exactly what discussion has taken place to arrive at a decision. It's a transparent system."

2. Hardly any questions from colleagues

"We're not the only ones who find it user-friendly," says Jennifer. "I wrote a very basic manual for my contacts who had to work with the app. Just an email with some basic information. More explanation wasn't necessary. I hardly got any questions. Of course, mistakes are made from time to time, but nothing major and as a main user I can usually fix it myself. And if there are questions, we can always turn to Jan Thesingh and Stefan van der Fange, legal affairs advisors at OOS. They always respond very quickly. They coordinated the entire introduction and implementation very well."

"There were few questions from users, the program is user-friendly. And the guidance from our functional managers helps enormously if you really can't figure it out."

^{- Leonie Verheijen | secretary at the Institute for Finance & Accounting}

3. Last minute changes possible

"Even if the guides are almost finished, there can always be a last minute change. Such a change is much less drastic than before", Jennifer explains. Because everything happens in the application and the guides are published online, you can make changes close to the release date. And any errata no longer need to be published separately." It's clear that these users want Docfield to stay. Jennifer: "I'm very curious about our students' reactions."

Is there nothing left to improve?

Is there nothing left to improve? Well, Jennifer and Leonie still have a few wishes. "How to add formatting, such as italics and underlining, takes some getting used to." For Leonie too, who would like more extensive formatting options. "Creating tables should be able to be done more easily." Jennifer: "More importantly, I find the lack of a search function. If you want to search for a term now, you can only do so by exporting to pdf and then searching there. That's cumbersome." According to Leonie, there is also still work to be done for an editor at M&C. "We have transferred texts from the old guides and there appear to be quite a few errors in them. That's a shame. The guides are accessible to everyone; in addition to the content of the study guide, correct spelling and neat formatting are really important."

From Docfield, we have noted that it is not always clear to users which text in the document comment refers to. We are therefore busy improving the comment function for even more effective collaboration. Being able to annotate text and then attach comments to it is an option we are exploring.