Riding the Eastern Wind and Braving the Summit: The Digital Chronicle of Huanghe Jiaotong University

For many years, Huanghe College of Communication has utilized DingTalk as its smart office platform, continuously advancing the school's digital transformation by focusing on teachers’ and students’ information needs. It has achieved comprehensive innovation in teaching, management, and services. Teachers and students can handle over 80% of school matters with just a mobile phone, fully realizing the goal of "letting data run more so teachers and students can run less."

"The majestic Taihang Mountains shape the soul of the Chinese nation; the roaring Yellow River sings the dreams of China..." The college's anthem not only conveys the determined belief of this university, named after the mother river, in inheriting the civilization of China, but it also reflects its determination and wisdom as Henan province’s only application-oriented undergraduate institution focused on cultivating transportation talents to explore educational digitalization and intelligence in a new era.

For many years, Huanghe College of Communication has utilized DingTalk as its smart office platform, continuously advancing the school's digital transformation by focusing on teachers’ and students’ information needs. It has achieved comprehensive innovation in teaching, management, and services. Teachers and students can handle over 80% of school matters with just a mobile phone, fully realizing the goal of "letting data run more so teachers and students can run less."

✦First Encounter with DingTalk:

The "Timely Rain" of Information Transmission

In 2015, amidst the early rise of digital transformation and smart campus concepts, Huanghe College of Communication敏锐ly sensed changes in the trend of information transformation in higher education: the primary challenge at the time was the timely conveyance and confirmation of essential information. Traditional OA office systems were inconvenient for mobile operation, and even if mass text messages were adopted, the effects were unsatisfactory, and repeated usage led to high costs.

But is there actually a good tool capable of "curing this problem fundamentally?"

In searching for a solution, teacher Chang Benchao, who was responsible for the school’s informatization, carefully sought effective ways. Eventually, his efforts paid off, and he discovered an introduction to the mobile application DingTalk while reading a computer magazine in the library. The immediate communication and guaranteed message delivery functions touted by DingTalk were exactly what the school needed to solve the issue of inconvenient and untimely communication!

Therefore, Mr. Chang decided to trial the app within his department and quickly found that DingTalk not only allowed unlimited messaging but also provided timely automatic feedback after messages were sent. If the recipient hadn’t downloaded the app, the message would be delivered through SMS or voice call. Compared to other tools, it was truly a "unique device," living up to its slogan "message must be delivered."

As Mr. Chang delved deeper into DingTalk, he discovered that besides being a convenient and efficient communication tool, it also offered a diverse range of office applications, such as OA approval, notifications, and Ding Pan (cloud storage). These functions seamlessly complemented the third-party OA system currently in use by the school. This fortuitous trial planted the seeds of digitization and intelligence for Huanghe College of Communication. During the following nearly ten years, the school not only migrated the OA system’s functions onto DingTalk but also integrated and connected other smart campus application systems to DingTalk, carrying out numerous explorations based on the platform to realize seamless information sharing and refined management improvements.

✦Returning from Zhejiang University to Gain Insights:

Customized "One-Stop Service" Goes Live

Amidst rapid informatization in universities, Henan Provincial Department of Education organized training for leaders of undergraduate universities to visit Zhejiang University in 2018 for training on informatization. Teacher Chang represented his university.

After returning, Mr. Chang promptly reported in detail the advanced educational informatization theories and experiences of Zhejiang province, especially the on-going reforms in “One-Stop Service” at local universities, to the school leadership upon his return.

The school leadership immediately organized related departments to hold discussions and decided to follow the experience of Zhejiang's universities, combined with the school's real conditions. By promoting "One-Stop Service" reforms, the school aimed to shift departmental management concepts and enhance service awareness, making "DingTalk" an essential tool to achieve approval without face-to-face interaction, bringing services to wherever people need.

Specifically:

OA Approval function

The introduction of OA approval functions has greatly simplified the school's approval processes. Whether it is taking time off, reimbursements, or procurement, applications can be submitted directly on DingTalk and the approval progress can be tracked in real-time. This not only saves teachers' and students' time but also enhances the transparency and fairness of the approval process.

Announcements and Notices Function

The announcements and notices function ensures rapid delivery of all types of notices and announcements to every teacher and student. From urgent notifications to important activity schedules, all can be pushed promptly via DingTalk to relevant parties, ensuring timeliness and precision of information dissemination.

Ding Pan functionality

The Ding Pan functionality provides the school with a secure and convenient cloud storage platform. Teachers and students can upload important files to Ding Pan for access and sharing anytime and anywhere. This not only solves issues like file loss and difficult sharing in traditional storage methods, but also enhances work efficiency and collaboration capabilities;

Others

In addition, DingTalk offers a variety of functions such as group live streaming, work logs, and smart meetings to meet the school's needs in different scenarios.

Teachers and students truly experienced the convenience of "handling all affairs in one visit" while dealing with file inquiries, meeting room reservations, leave applications,通行证applications, equipment repairs, scholarship applications, etc.

According to the school's notification on the "Implementation Plan for Promoting Administrative Approval 'One-Time Visit' Reforms," the school achieved over 70% of its administrative matters being fully processed online and mobile by the end of July 2020, marking a new level of service quality and reputation.

✦DingTalk Shines During the Pandemic

DingTalk Helps the School Navigate the Crisis

During the nearly 10 years of walking alongside DingTalk, Mr. Chang expressed deep feelings. Compared with other software platforms, DingTalk's overt value for universities' digitalization can perhaps be described as "accomplishing big things with little or no cost."

At the end of 2019, the outbreak of the pandemic caught many universities off guard, abruptly highlighting the importance of informatization. Teachers needed to conduct live classes, and students needed to clock in for attendance, and all kinds of demands surged in, posing an unprecedented challenge to university teaching and management, testing the results of informatization construction.

It is reported that many schools urgently purchased necessary servers, expanded campus network bandwidth, deployed live platforms, and spent over one million yuan due to the sudden increase in demand for online live lectures at that time.

However, thanks to its mature use of DingTalk, Huanghe College of Communication remained calm in the face of this challenge: "We didn't even spend a penny and quietly solved many problems during the pandemic with DingTalk."

DingTalk’s group live streaming feature became essential support for the college's online teaching during the pandemic. Through DingTalk, teachers could easily conduct live lectures and provide online Q&A sessions, while students could watch live streams, submit assignments, and take exams from home using their phones or computers. This not only ensured smooth teaching activities but also reduced the risk of personnel gathering and cross-infection. Meanwhile, DingTalk's attendance system also provided strong support for the university's pandemic control work. By using the clock-in feature on DingTalk, the university was able to monitor the health status and travel records of teachers and students in real-time; once abnormal situations were discovered, immediate preventive and responsive measures could be taken accordingly. This not only improved the efficiency and accuracy of pandemic control but also enhanced teachers' and students' sense of security and trust.

After 2019, with the normalization and widespread use of DingTalk across the college, the school continued to focus on exploring the professional version and upgrading digital capabilities. Files from the administration, teachers’ teaching materials, and students’ assignments were gradually migrated to the DingTalk platform. Efforts were also made to try converting school-specific content into classified knowledge repositories. Combined with the newly launched AI assistant feature on DingTalk, this created a customized AI helper specifically for the school to provide convenience for teachers and students in their studies and daily lives.

In addition, the information technology department used DingTalk's low-code platform for customized development, continuously improving functions such as visitor reception and equipment repair, and developed applications like grade inquiry, timetable inquiry, and library searches. Within the information technology group chats of various universities, Mr. Chang frequently shared innovative applications he noticed from other universities with his colleagues, for example turning DingTalk's built-in calendar feature into a system for attendance through classroom schedule-based QR code scanning. This encourages teachers to creatively use DingTalk’s existing features to serve their teaching needs and generate new ways of functioning.

"Unlike primary and secondary education, the threshold for informatization in higher education is much higher because each university has different needs. Standardized, one-size-fits-all systems cannot usually address all schools’ diverse requirements. For universities undergoing digital transformation today, DingTalk is an invaluable tool that can seamlessly integrate through open APIs with a variety of locally deployed smart applications," said Mr. Chang, expressing his plans to further collaborate with DingTalk to continue improving the "One-Stop Service" solution, further enhancing campus service standards, governance, teaching, and research efficiency.

Glimmers of Huanghe College of Communication's story with DingTalk not only serve as a vivid case of educational digital transformation but also reflect a forward-looking vision for the promising future of smart education. The path of digital and intelligent education in institutions of higher learning is long, but it is foreseeable that many more such digital transformation stories are quietly unfolding and emerging every day. Whether hidden in the subtle details of everyday teaching or appearing in grand narratives of academic management, they remain for us to discover, create, and write together.