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!