Celebrating Five Years of openSAP

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…

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…

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:

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

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!