SAP Business ByDesign and openSAP: Free Training in the Cloud

Since 2015, openSAP and SAP Business ByDesign have been collaborating to offer free trainings, open for everyone, on a variety of SAP Business ByDesign modules.

The trainings are offered in MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) format. Video lectures and self-tests can be always accessed on the openSAP platform, even when the course has run.

The first course to be published was “Application Development for SAP Business ByDesign”. Targeting mostly application developers, the course explained how to develop ad hoc add-ons for SAP Business ByDesign.

Thanks to the positive feedback from the participants, the SAP Business ByDesign team decided to offer a second course, this time focusing on the reporting capabilities of the ERP suite. In 2016, “Reporting with SAP Business ByDesign” was published. Over 12,300 students have enrolled on this course to date.

The most recent course in the SAP Business ByDesign series, delivered in 2017, is “SAP Business ByDesign Financials”. The course closed early April and, like the other two, was very successful.

Over 13% of the course participants received a record of achievement and about 24% received a confirmation of participation. The participants were very active and engaged. There were over 470 discussion forum posts. Most of the questions were about the course content, or system-related questions. The posted questions and the answers from the content experts are still available on the openSAP platform. There is a search field at the top of the page you can use to search for the topics you are interested in (e.g. accrual methods or VAT return) and find the answers from the course experts.

So, was the time invested in learning worth it in the end? The results of our survey show a clear “yes”.

95% of the students were (very) satisfied with the course content and the learning experience on openSAP, and over 90% of the course participants believe that the skills taught in the course will help them in their future work.

Great feedback was shared in the “I like, I wish” section. In particular, the exercises, which the participants could complete in the systems with no access fees, were greatly appreciated.

Here are some examples of the comments we received:

“I believe this course is built from the end user perspective and I loved it”

“The access to several real test systems and the step by steps instructions to see in detail each process has been the best way to know this new product, because we can test and feel how it works”

“The course content was well structured and taught. Would recommend this course to others. Can tell that a lot of effort was put into to making the course so detailed and well thought out.”

If you are curious to learn more about the course statistics, have a look at this infographic

If this blog made you curious about the course, you can still enroll, watch the videos, and take the self-tests. The training systems will be available until June 2017. If you would like to get a record of achievement, you can consider reactivating the course. You can read more about this option in the openSAP reactivation info page.