Celebrating Five Years of openSAP

[Clemens]

Just over 5 years ago, I participated in a Massive Open Online Course as a learner at openHPI. openHPI was a new learning platform provided by the Hasso Plattner Institute and I signed up to a course by Hasso himself to learn about in-memory data management. I really enjoyed the experience as a learner and I wondered how we could adapt this method of knowledge transfer at SAP. I’ve worked in the educational area of SAP for many years and this new MOOC initiative was something really different and I got excited about it. I shared my enthusiasm and idea with my management and bernd.welz was willing to try it out and see how it would be accepted in the corporate world. (Check out the recent video with the story of how openSAP began). thomas.jung and rich.heilman were the first experts that we invited to try out creating a course in MOOC format for SAP. And well, the rest is history! Here we are celebrating our fifth anniversary – as they say, time flies when you’re having fun!

 

Although I know that people like openSAP (from our surveys, ‘I like I wish’ discussion forums, and speaking to learners about openSAP), I’m always pleasantly surprised to see the positive comments in the SAP Community. Upon my regular browse through the community, I often see community members recommending openSAP courses to others, via answers to questions and in blog comments. I was especially happy to see the increased commentary within the SAP community around our course, Writing Testable Code with ABAP, over the last few weeks. For us as a team, it’s motivating to see that our work helps SAP users in the real world.

Since it’s our anniversary week, you’ve probably seen a variety of communication from us already such as:

• 2.5 million course enrollments


• 630,000 unique learners


• 180,000 unique visitors per month


• 3 Mio+ pageviews per month

So I thought I’d share some numbers with you from the last five years that we haven’t previously shared – hopefully they’re as interesting for you as they are for me!

Most enrollments in one…

	Number	Date	Event
…day	8,972	April 18, 2018	Enrollment for our first certification related course, “Prepare for your SAP HANA Certification” as well as “SAP Retail Omnichannel Commerce” and “Smart Services Welt”
…week	31,626	February 5-11, 2018	Enrollment opened for “Writing Testable Code for ABAP”, “Cloud-Native Development with SAP Cloud Platform”, “Getting Started with SAP Lumira”
…month	77,179	March 2018
...quarter	205,176	Q1 2018
…year	654,380	2017

It’s great to see that these figures are all from recent times and that people continue to come back to openSAP for further learning opportunities. For me as portfolio lead, I need to decide which topics should progress to our platform and will be beneficial for our learners. It’s good to see that learners continue to enroll to these courses and they find value in the topics we choose.

Most new users in one…

	Number	Date	Event
…day	3,179	March 10, 2014	Introduction to SAP HANA with Vishal Sikka and SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA opened for enrollment
…week	8,938	April 27-May 2, 2013	Start of the first course, Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA
…month	23,705	May 2013	Launch of openSAP!
...quarter	50,405	Q2 2016	Launch of Software Design for Non-Designers, Experience SAP Hybris Solutions, SAP Digital Boardroom in a Nutshell, SAPPHIRE Now, SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, Sustainability Through Digital Transformation, High Availability and Disaster Recovery with the SAP HANA Platform, Developing Web Apps with SAPUI5, Enabling Entrepreneurs to Shape a Better World
…year	156,769	2016

Unlike with the course enrollments, once a user registers with openSAP, they don’t repeat the process but we’re really happy to see a steady growth of new users, with an average of 400 new learners joining openSAP on a daily basis.

Top 10 courses, based on number of enrollments:

Number	Enrollments	Course	Presenters
1	107,757	Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA	thomas.jung, rich.heilman
2	102,511	SAP S/4HANA in a Nutshell	bernd.leukert, markusschwarz, wieland.schreiner, Jens Krüger, rudolf.hois, Steffen von Berg, sven.denecken
3	85,098	Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform	rui.nogueira, martingrasshoff
4	77,148	An Introduction to SAP HANA	Vishal Sikka
5	76,355	Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud	bobcaswell, Yoram Friedman, Asi Messica, david.lincourt, Oliver Graeff, Raz Korn, virgil.suteu, ido.shemesh
6	67,173	SAP Cloud Platform Essentials	sven.kohlhaas
7	62,676	In-Memory Data Management In a Nutshell	juergen.mueller
8	60,411	ABAP Development for SAP HANA	jasmin.gruschke, jens.weiler
9	57,382	Implementation of SAP S/4HANA	Christopher Shinner, andreas.muno, kim.mathaess, elvira.wallis
10	53,279	Developing Web Apps with SAPUI5	Janina Bläsius, Christina Goebels, michael.graf, andreas.kunz, thomas.marz, thilo.seidel, martin.wittmann, margot.wollny

 

Top 5 courses (based on learners who are (very) satisfied with the course content)

Title	Rating
Empathy in Motion: The Power of Employee Volunteering	99.2 %
Using SAP Screen Personas for Advanced Scenarios	99.1 %
Building Portal Sites on SAP Cloud Platform	98.8 %
Extending SAP S/4HANA with SAP HANA Cloud Platform	98.7 %
Developing Mobile Apps with SAP HANA Cloud Platform	98.6 %

I’ve had an incredible five years with openSAP and I’ve been working with a team of wonderful colleagues under the highly motivating leadership of michaela.laemmler and sponsorship of stefan.haenisch and bernd.welz. I’ve enjoyed working closely with a variety of knowledgeable experts at SAP and with our learners, meeting at events such as, SAP TechEd and SAPPHIRE Now. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who has been involved with openSAP over the past five years – it’s been an absolute pleasure to be involved! Special thanks to my colleagues claire.donelon and Nathanael Schenk for their support in putting this blog together.

Here’s to the next twenty-five years!




 

[Margot]

Happy anniversary openSAP and team. It was a pleasure working with you 🙂
Hope there will be another opportunity soon!

[Clemens]

Thank you Margot, I would be happy to have you in another MOOC. Your SAPUI5 course was very successful and is reactivated the most.

[Former Member]

Happy Anniversary OpenSAP.

It has helped me a lot to learn Enterprise Data Science from scratch. On this occasion, I have gathered all the Machine Learning and Data Science related Courses and given my feedback on one blog. Hope it will help the Data Science aspirants a lot.

This is the best gift I can give on 5th Anniversary.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enterprise-data-science-learning-path-mostafa-kamal-mallick/?publishe...

[Clemens]

Thank you Mostafa, much appreciated.

[ERMAKOV_V_N]

Thank you very much openSAP team. Your service allows a huge number of people around the world to get free access to knowledge about the latest SAP technologies. And get verified certificates to confirm knowledge. My sincere gratitude to the whole team that gave us this magnificent tool for self-development.

P.S. I received 42 certificates for the last 2 years and it would be very interesting to learn about the successes of other people. You do not plan to create a page on site with the students rating?

[fim]

I attended my first openSAP course 2 years ago and shared my feelings and suggestions at How I benefited from openSAP course, some tips to help you in your learning and since then recommending the great resource to those interested in learning variety of SAP skills. Great job, clemens.link and the team. You guys have made the SAP learning accessible to all aspirants!

[Antonio_leites]

Congratulations on the success ... appreciate very much your effort ... perhaps some regular and updated statistics like the one you show today could be nice to have...

Thank you

[Clemens]

Congratulations on your great learning achievements, that's awesome! I just took a quick look and it seems that we have at least one openSAP learner with more than 150 certificates - incredible - and over 20 learners with more than a hundred each. I guess they started learning with us in 2013.

We don't plan to have a public rating/leaderboard because learners with openSAP should be self-motivated and we don't want to build a competitive environment. However we encourage learners to celebrate their individual achievements through their record of achievement and digital badges.

[Clemens]

Glad you benefit from openSAP in the exact way that we intended and great to hear that you encourage others to also join us to learn about SAP.

[Clemens]

Happy to hear you enjoyed the blog. We'll consider releasing statistics on a more regular basis in future.

[DouglasCezar]

Hi Clemens,

 

I am a perpetual self-starting learner and I use all kinds of online education, mainly MOOCs, including all of the most well-known options.

 

With that, I want to say that OpenSAP brings us some of the best available online courses when it comes to depth and content quality. You really do an outstanding work of creating and sharing valuable knowledge!

 

Congratulations on your well-deserved success and I wish many more successful years to OpenSAP!

 

 

Kind regards,

Douglas

[ERMAKOV_V_N]

Hi Clemens,

Thank you very much for this info (very interesting). I got a new goal for self-development.

And as a minute of nostalgia - a map of the distribution of learners on the course "Touch IoT with SAP Leonardo" (iot3; June 29, 2017).



full video

[bpawanchand]

Congratulations to the team, I could still remember the first course which I took in 2013. it was fun. Looking forward for more

[Clemens]

Thank you Pavan. We're still following the tried and trusted principles of our first MOOCs from 2013 by adding additional features like peer assessment or team work from time to time. Most important to us is to always aim for delivering high quality content directly from the experts. The huge amount of learner feedback per course constantly helps us to know where we are and what to improve.

 

[Clemens]

Thanks a lot, Douglas. Very motivating for the openSAP team and me personally.

[former_member182041]

Wishing many more years of success to openSAP and team!

 

 

Regards,

Kumud

[Clemens]

Thank you, Kumud 🙂

Cheers, Clemens

[former_member571530]

Wow, I feel honoured to be a part of such an amazing initiative with an inspiring history. When I started off with MOOCs, I was concerned that I wouldn’t possess the discipline to finish what I start. Surprisingly, I ended up completing five remarkable courses on openSAP. It turned out to my favourite online learning platform because it encouraged teamwork and connected you with the instructors.

[Clemens]

Very nice comment, Momal. It is wonderful to read that openSAP turned out to your favourite online learning platform - highly motivating for me and the whole team. Thank you.