Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen

Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen is the network organisation of the Catholic (high) schools, boarding schools, centres and universities in Flanders and Brussels.

As the largest educational player in Flanders, its educational project animates more than 935,000 children, young people and adults.

Digital collaborative workshop for Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen

Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen is the largest network association within the education network of freely subsidised education in Flanders and Brussels. For the WeShare project, the network association was looking for a partner who could build a digital collaboration platform for, among other things, qualitative and targeted guidance in schools and the creation of policy reports. This digital collaboration site was developed by Callista in Odoo and is used by as many as 800 employees.

"The new platform acts as a collaborative workshop for pedagogical supervisors supporting our schools," says Martien. "All information about counselling in schools is collected in a platform so that counsellors have visibility of each other's work. Similarly, guidance documents are available through the platform via an integration with MS Sharepoint. Supervisors have access to each other's material to support each other and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel."

A niche solution

"For our WeShare project, we were looking for a partner who could build us a digital collaboration platform for our pedagogical supervisors," Martien continues. "The aim of the platform is to facilitate cooperation between counsellors, with a view to qualitative and targeted counselling in schools, and in which policy reports can also be made. As an organisation, we have our own IT department, but due to the complexity and size of the project, the choice was made to engage an external party. The IT department was already charmed by the possibilities of Odoo, especially also because of its open source idea and modular structure."

"We then started looking for a suitable partner with analytical capacity and solid IT competences" Martien continues, "because a standard Odoo application was no help to us. Callista knows how to combine the advantages of Odoo as a block box with far-reaching customised functionalities. After all, we knew that our request was very specific."

Martien: "Moreover, the digital collaborative workshop is not only very functional towards supervisors, but also for our organisation. We can extract data from it for our own quality development and reporting. After all, we get budgets from the government for which we have to report on our work."

On a budget

In a timeframe of eight months, Callista brought a first version of the application live. Martien: "After the initial delivery, the platform was taken into use by 115 supervisors. Based on their feedback, adjustments and additions were made to finally arrive at a final version at the end of the 2020 - 2021 school year. To date, everything is running neatly and within budget, not insignificantly. The estimations made beforehand by Callista are being followed up quite correctly. Callista also works in a very organised manner, giving demos to our staff and working step by step towards a unified result. With a subsequent delivery for school year 2021 - 2022, the collaboration platform was put into use by all our employees and the application is being used as a quality tool in our organisation. Meanwhile, more and more Odoo implementations are starting and we are happy to build on our successful cooperation with Callista."