How UMCG cut face-to-face training by 33% with blended learning and Easygenerator

The University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) is one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands. It combines patient care, education, and research, and supports thousands of healthcare professionals across specialties. Marina Wildeboer is a nursing instructor and curriculum designer at the Wenckebach Institute, WIOO, UMCG. Over the years, she has also helped design the hospital’s blended learning strategy. Marina’s learners are primarily nurses who specialize in different areas of patient care.

WIOO, UMCG already had a blended learning approach in place. Their in-person training was well-established, but they wanted to scale digital learning. That’s why they needed a tool that would allow the medical and nursing staff and educators to create their own e-learning content. This had always been the setup—training was conducted by the healthcare professionals who knew the content best. But the process was not yet scalable. Face-to-face training sessions took a lot of time, and learners lacked access to just-in-time learning materials. To truly scale their learning, UMCG needed a way to make content creation simple, fast, and collaborative.

UMCG chose Easygenerator because of its ease of use. They needed an authoring tool that healthcare workers could pick up quickly without needing experience in e-learning design or outside help. Now, every course at UMCG is created by healthcare professionals—and always as a team. “It’s the medical and nursing instructors, the nurses, and the doctors who can co-create the content,” says Marina. “That way, our training program is truly aligned with the learners.” Co-authorship helps maintain quality, spreads the workload, and makes the process less intimidating. The healthcare workers create and review courses together using Easygenerator’s real-time editing and in-app commenting features. This collaboration also speeds up the process. People don’t need to schedule meetings or go back and forth over email. They can add feedback, make edits, and move forward—all in the same tool. But creating the training is only part of the process—keeping it up to date is just as important. In healthcare, things change constantly: protocols, equipment, procedures. As Marina points out, “You can’t go a whole year without updating content. Care is always changing, and you have to stay aware of that.” With Easygenerator, teams can update courses instantly, and co-authors keep each other in check.

Once Easygenerator was introduced, WIOO, UMCG’s L&D team introduced a basic framework that showed healthcare professionals how to shape their e-learning. That was all the structure the teams needed. After that, the healthcare professionals and instructors took over entirely. They created their own content and kept the momentum going. There’s no review process from L&D, no bottlenecks, and no waiting. Co-authorship is built into every step. Most courses have four to six co-authors; in some cases, more. Teams divide the work, review each other’s content, and collaborate directly inside Easygenerator.

See how UMCG has increased its output with Easygenerator.