4-H automates and streamlines the curriculum peer review process
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When your peer review process relies on mailing physical documents back and forth, getting new educational content published can take the better part of a year. That was the reality for 4-H, the nation’s largest youth development organization, until the organization partnered with Nutrient Workflow to automate its curriculum review system.
Background
The National 4-H Council(opens in a new tab) is the nation’s largest youth development organization, empowering six million young people throughout the United States. 4-H provides life-changing programs available through 4-H clubs, camps, and afterschool and school enrichment programs in every county and parish in the U.S.
In addition to its wide-ranging youth programs, 4-H also develops a variety of educational materials and curriculum with the help of professionals around the country. 4-H needed a solution to improve and automate its national curriculum peer review system for these educational materials.
“We were looking for a system to take this manual process and make it automatic and smooth.”
Challenge
According to Tara Wheeler, the director of learning products at 4-H, “We used to mail publications to reviewers, have reviewers return items by mail, transcribe edits, and then share edits with authors.” 4-H selected Nutrient Workflow as its workflow management tool based on the numerous automation options and pricing flexibility.
Before 4-H started working with Nutrient Workflow, the peer review process was not only very manual but also poorly defined. Too many people were involved in the process, and each person’s role wasn’t clearly articulated. As is often the case, bringing on workflow automation triggered a much-needed reevaluation and overhaul of the existing process.
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Implementation
The implementation and adoption have met all of 4-H’s expectations. “The system has consistently performed well for us since then,” Wheeler shared.
4-H had Nutrient Workflow build out its entire peer-review process to its specifications, advise on best practices, and ensure the process was properly tested before launch.
“Before Nutrient Workflow, a typical peer review process for one new piece of content could take 6–9 months. Now it takes 2–3 weeks.”
Since the initial rollout, 4-H has supported a training program for professionals interested in becoming peer reviewers. Passing a web-based course is what qualifies 4-H professionals as peer reviewers. Reviewers are critical to the success of the process and are valued for their expertise in specific subject-matter areas and youth development. Wheeler’s experience with Nutrient Workflow’s service and support has been very positive.
Given the national footprint of 4-H, when the organization needed to communicate the new, automated process to the peer review community, the workgroup responsible for enabling the new process presented a series of webinars to explain how the new process worked and how to use the new Nutrient Workflow portal. Curriculum authors were trained on the expectations and on how to submit documents for review.
“From time to time, we need to reach out to the Nutrient Workflow Support team to assist us with more complex workflow edits, and the team always takes care of what we need in a responsive and friendly manner.”
Results and benefits
The results of the new, automated peer review process have been striking. Turning a snail mail system of edits and comments into a coherent, purpose-built, automated online workflow for peer reviewers and content submitters has had a transformational effect on 4-H’s curriculum development program.
“The efficiencies have allowed 4-H to publish twice as much content each year.”
According to Wheeler, “The automation has greatly reduced our internal workload. We’re just much more efficient and smart about how we do things now.”
By reducing peer review time from 6–9 months to just 2–3 weeks and doubling annual content output, workflow automation has transformed how 4-H delivers educational materials to six million young people across the country. What started as a manual, mail-based process is now a streamlined system that lets 4-H focus on what matters most: empowering the next generation.
