INTERNET-BASED SAP COURSES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIGHER
EDUCATION: "erp4students"
Heimo H. Adelsberger 1, Pouyan Khatami 1, Taymaz Khatami 1, Thomas Richter 1
1
University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
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Abstract
With the program “erp4students”, we introduce a successful solution on how to meet the demands of
Bologna in terms of directly preparing university students for the world of works without having to give
up the basic principle to focus university education exclusively on sustainable contents. The program
is herein introduced from general concept and design over demographic development in the course of
the past decade to implemented quality assurance mechanisms. It consists of a number of vocational
training courses and is not limited to students from a specific field or context but internationally acces-
sible and open to any registered student. Thus, it shall serve as a best-practice example on how such
programs can be implemented and invite students and faculty from all over the world to join our ef-
forts. This paper, further on, intends to encourage faculty and institutions around the world to design
similar content offers and to share related results and experiences with the community.
Keywords: Enterprise Resource Planning, Technology Enhanced Learning, Internet based Learning,
Professional Training, e-Learning, SAP, Global Learning, Tutor-based Training, erp4students.
1 INTRODUCTION
Since many years, industry has been complaining that students, leaving the universities, are full of
theoretical knowledge, which is not or just partly applicable in their future jobs; the graduates often
would completely lack relevant competences and soft skills, working practice, and even the most basic
understanding of what business-life would be alike. This critique from the world of works towards aca-
demia is so basic that it could actually go back to the roots of academia, when universities were estab-
lished and started to provide education. Academia’s answer, however, might have been the same
even then: Every (academic) university’s task is to provide a profound level of understanding of gen-
eral and thus, timeless concepts, theories, ideas, and mechanisms; of life, existence, the world, its en-
tities and the interactions amongst the entities. In contrast, applied knowledge and particularly applica-
tion-related knowledge were considered timely restricted and to latter, even “short-termed”. As com-
promises, technical universities and universities of applied sciences were created in the German (lan-
guage) context, which at least focused on applied knowledge (if not on application-related knowledge).
One of the major tasks for the context of Higher Education that derived from Bologna [1] and the Sor-
bonne declaration [2] was the general idea to initially prepare students for the world of works: When
granting Bachelor degrees after three years of studying, universities should ensure that the knowledge
and understanding of the graduates makes them valuable enough for being employed in a firm. In
Germany, Bologna failed due to several reasons: First, the Bachelor degrees substituted the well-
known and highly valued traditional German Diploma and Magister degrees. Even though they actual-
ly constituted a far higher level, enterprises simply understood the Bachelor degrees as the traditional
halfway examinations of the former diploma degrees. Second, the government did not sufficiently sup-
port the implementation by promoting the newly established degrees and their potential for the enter-
prises. Third, as the most problematic issue, in a century-old tradition, the German language countries
already had established a practical tertiary education, the apprenticeships in industry-related and craft-
ing disciplines. To some extent, the Bachelor-degree constituted a concurrent type of education (in
both directions) [3]. Apprenticeships, be it as programmers, chefs, nurses, metal workers, painters,
wood-crafters, mechanics, electricians, mechatronics, electricians, or biological-technical and chemi-
cal-technical assistants took three to three-and-a-half years and were carried out in both, enterprises
and public schools; latter were responsible for the theoretical foundation and ensured that apprentices
from very specialized enterprises (e. g., learning to cook within a Chinese restaurant) received the full
set of competences to complete general job-related tasks in any professional context (cooking in any
type of kitchen). Such apprenticeships also included application-related knowledge. Bachelors of craft
or industry were much better prepared for immediately being assigned to concrete practical tasks in
the enterprises even if not fully understanding in detail why something is to be done in a particular way
(e. g., never fighting burning fat with water). As for the academic Bachelor-degree holders, they were
expected to adopt themselves to any task within a limited amount of time (just not immediately). Thus,
in the German language context, the non-academic (practical) Bachelor degree from the Chamber of
Crafts or the Chamber of Industry and Commerce stood in direct concurrence to thematically related
academic Bachelor degrees; with a clear advantage for the apprenticeships.
It is still not fully clear, which specific abilities distinguish academic Bachelor degree holders from non-
academic bachelors in terms of advantages on the job market at entry-level. Sure, academic Bache-
lors have a deep general understanding of the context and above that, also a basic understanding of
typical strategies, measures and theories, which the former apprentices fully lack. Just, at least for the
first years of employment, the return of investment when employing the cheaper non-academic bache-
lors who far quicker can fully be integrated within work processes still appears higher for the enterpris-
es. In a yet unpublished study we conducted some years ago on the acceptance of Bachelor degrees
for employment in German firms, we found that German enterprises rather employ alumni with an old
Diploma or a new Master degree in Information Systems than with an academic Bachelor degree from
the same field. The major reason for related perceptions of the Bachelor degree holders were said to
be a missing argument why they should earn a higher salary than the “apparently” adequate non-
academic bachelors without granting a higher return on investment (in the first years). In our inter-
views, we additionally found in our interviews within the firms that on a rather general level, the HR
managers fully lacked the understanding, what a Bachelor degree actually would mean in their field.
The relevant question to answer is: What can universities do to better prepare their students for the
world of works without having to betray their basic principles of education? In this paper, the program
“erp4students” is being introduced as a best-practice example on how the gap can be bridged be-
tween the fully sustainable provision of general theoretical knowledge (the traditional academic educa-
tional approach) and the very particular demands from the world of works for applied and application-
related knowledge and competences.
After the introduction of the state of the art we first describe the basic ideas and concepts behind our
program. Subsequently, we will introduce our particular program- and course design and hitherto
made achievements. Finally, our plans for the future are being introduced as well as issues that still
require solutions.
2 UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING: NO CONTRADICTION
The university of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) intended to bridge the gap between the traditional academic
education, which means to exclusively teach timeless academic knowledge, and following the de-
mands of the enterprises to also teach currently relevant key-technologies and applications; with the
risk that these might possibly just be of value for a very limited time. The program “erp4students” is an
offer to university students for extra-occupational professional training, while “occupation” is meant in
the sense of full-time studying. While, at first in 2006, erp4students exclusively was available in Ger-
man language and to German students in the field of Information Systems Research, nowadays, stu-
dents from many countries and arbitrary fields of study have access to the courses in up to four lan-
guages, can participate in examinations, and achieve the provided highly valued certifications to prove
their ability in using and programming SAP systems.
Without excluding the theoretical understanding of the field, the educational program “erp4students”
offers learners the opportunity to intensively engage with practical aspects of “Enterprise Resource
Planning” (ERP). In today’s world of work where just a little percentage of enterprises remain without
the support of Information Technology, ERP is basic and highly relevant knowledge across disciplines.
However, the program does not limit the learned lessons to an in-depth understanding of the underly-
ing theoretical concepts and mechanisms of ERP, but it leads the students through many hands-on
sessions to achieve practice-relevant competences in working with the world’s leading ERP software,
which, with a market-share of 24 percentage (2013), is the solution of the SAP SE [4].
Together with the SAP University Alliance as a strong partner at the side, erp4students provides a set
of extra-curricular courses, developed at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and by agree-
ment with the SAP University Alliance, exclusively offered to university students (non-profit).
Writing a steadily ongoing success story since 2006, erp4students offers a growing number of prac-
tice-oriented, student-focused, purely Internet-based, and tutor-supported courses on different mod-
ules of SAP. In 2006, when erp4students launched its first basic SAP course in German language, 63
students exclusively from Germany registered and eventually were awarded with in-house certificates.
Ten years later, 5200 students from 110 countries are registered as participants, actively participating,
and permanently supported by tutors, capable of the languages English, German, Russian and Span-
ish. Figure 1 shows the thirteen qualified courses on beginner and advanced level (courses on ad-
vanced level presume the knowledge from the courses on beginner-level) erp4students currently of-
fers; most available in German and English and some, additionally, in Spanish and/or Russian.
Figure 1: Today’s courses within the program “erp4students”
Additionally to our in-house certificates, which internationally are acknowledged by many academic in-
stitutions as adequate to six ECTS points (180 hours of work), for most of the courses, the official ex-
aminations offered by the SAP SE are accessible; just that the participating students pay a significant-
ly lower price for these official examinations than they would have to pay after having completed their
studies. This constitutes an additional advantage for their later professional life.
The process students undergo from registration to being awarded with the in-house participation-
certificates is outlined in Figure 2. Due to its widely linear and homogenous (the same process for all
courses) design, it is easy to cope with for the learners so that they always know where they stand
and what they have to do next.
Figure 2: erp4students – Enrolment procedure from registration to awarding certificate
The whole process can be subdivided into three distinct sets of sub-processes, i. e.:
1. the registration, including the transmission of relevant personal data, the choice of a course
and completing the payment procedure;
2. the course itself, starting with the dark field in the lower middle, fully supported by local tutors
(assigned in the separate middle block);
3. and finally, the formalities to grant and deliver the certificates.
The whole process is implemented as a dialogue between the student (in the upper frame), the tutor-
ing system (in the middle frame), and the administration of erp4students (in the lower frame).
The first set of sub-processes is initialized by the online registration of a student. At this point, the stu-
dent has already decided for a particular course he/she is interested in. He submits his completed
online registration form (to be found on the website of erp4students) to the administration and receives
a confirmation alongside with an information package and the request for an acknowledgement of the
legal status as a student. The student-status is the only mandatory condition to participate. After the
interested student has submitted the enrolment receipt of the university he/she is currently studying at,
the erp4students administration confirms the student’s meeting of all formal requirements and submits
the payment details. The student, in return, initiates the payment. Once completed, the administration
confirms the formal enrolment, welcomes the new participant and individually prepares the course
start (the dark field in the center of the lower frame).
After the administration sent the access data for the course via E-Mail to the participant (in the follow-
ing, “learner”), which initializes the second set of sub-processes, further communication mainly takes
place between the learner and the erp4students tutoring system. The tutoring system, as an entity rep-
resented in the middle frame of Figure 2, actually consists of individuals and teams of real persons
who permanently monitor the students’ activities in order to quickly provide support in case of need. In
the beginning of this phase, the learner starts working on the chosen course. In case of difficulties,
which appear to overburden the learner, the tutor is to be contacted. Assumed the learner provided all
relevant details, the tutor returns clues in order to support the finding an own solution, else, the tutor
might ask for more details. Our strategy not to help through immediately solving the problems of the
learners, but instead, giving them clues on how to help themselves, enables the learners to develop
competences for problem solving in general and for the practical work with ERP systems, in particular.
When a learner finished a case study, the related data sheets are submitted for evaluation to the tutor
(an active process, initialized through the learner). The tutor, now, verifies the correctness and pro-
vides feedback regarding the quality of the solution. If the solution actually meets the defined require-
ments, the case study is being closed. The successful completion is included in the weekly progress
report, which the tutor submits to the learner as a part of the constant feedback and to the administra-
tion for purposes of documentation.
Once a learner has successfully completed all case studies within the course, the last set of sub-
processes is initialized: First, the tutoring system informs both the learner and the administration of
this new status quo. Subsequently, the administration prepares the in-house certificate of the Universi-
ty of Duisburg-Essen and ships it to the learner. These in-house certificates are not just confirmation
letters signifying a course-completion, but the students can use them to ask their university for recog-
nition of the credit points for their own study (it generally is recommended to do this before starting).
Additionally, these certificates are the precondition to register for the official SAP examinations with a
massively reduced fee, which is only available for current university students. The examinations can
be taken at defined locations at fixed intervals.
3 DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT OF ERP4STUDENTS
The program “erp4students” underwent quite an impressive development from the initial enrolment of
a single TERP10 course for 63 local students until today. Both the numbers of participants and the re-
gional distribution steadily increased over the course of the years between 2006 and today, 2015.
3.1 Development of Student-Participant-Numbers over the Years
As the following Figure 3 shows, the participant numbers of the program erp4students steadily in-
creased between 2006 and 2014. As for 2015, we have already registered 5200 participants.
Figure 3: erp4students: development of student numbers from 2006 to 2014
With the wider distribution of our program across the world, our membership in the Academy Cube ini-
tialized by the SAP SE, and with the increasing variety of course modules we expect the hitherto moni-
tored progress in numbers of participants and regional distribution to be ongoing at least for the next
decade.
3.2 Today’s Distribution of Learners across Countries
Figure 4: Participating learners’ distribution across countries in 2015 (erp4students)
While in 2006, erp4students consisted of a single course (SAP TERP10 for beginners) exclusively of-
fered to students in the developing university (University of Duisburg-Essen), in this year, 5200 stu-
dents from 110 countries registered for our courses. Figure 4 shows the current status quo of coun-
tries in the world where our learners currently come from. Since we did not conduct advertisement un-
til now, it indirectly also indicates where universities are located which actively support the participa-
tion of their students.
4 QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN ERP4STUDENTS
A central reason for the success of erp4students is regularly conducting quality assessments and con-
sidering found results in later implemented versions and new courses. The Quality Management strat-
egy within erp4stuents follows the first part of the German concept “Qualitätsplattform Lernen” (transl.:
“quality platform learning”) [5], which describes a holistic approach basing on three parts, i. e., quality
of educational offers, basic quality of organizations, and measures for excellent quality in organiza-
tions. The chosen first part of the concept deals with the request for a transparent provision of infor-
mation regarding the educational offers, related to clear definitions of target groups and purposes, full
transparency regarding the chosen approaches for didactics and methodology, used media, imple-
mented roles, tasks for each of the roles, measures to control learning success, technological issues,
and evaluation. With this approach, several national and international standards have been united.
While most instruments are implemented and used a single time during the phases course planning
and production, the student evaluation is a repeatedly used instrument for ongoing quality control. The
concept generally was that the programs are made for the learners and not for profit and thus, the sat-
isfaction of our customers shall fully be considered in terms of finding improvement potential. We use
an online questionnaire as central instrument for the data collection. The survey is conducted after
each semester and the students of the current semester are to be asked to evaluate a small number
of questions on a 7-point Likert scale from -3 to +3.
4.1 Student Evaluation: Focus and Criteria
The following thirteen questions constitute the part of the questionnaire, which directly deals with their
perception of the booked course’s quality and their wishes for further improvement.
Students’ Questionnaire (Excerpt):
• How would you evaluate the mediation of teaching contents?
• How would you evaluate the usefulness of the contents for your original field of study?
• How would you evaluate the usefulness of the contents for your future job?
• How would you evaluate the structuring of the contents?
• How would you evaluate the comprehensibility of the contents?
• How would you evaluate the quality of learning support?
• How would you evaluate the general organizing of your course?
• How would you evaluate the quality of support in case of organizational issues?
• How would you evaluate the quality of support in case of technical issues?
• How would you evaluate the communication with your peers?
• Would you rather wish to work on a platform of the type like Facebook or StudiVZ, which could
be used to support communication with peers and enterprises?
• Do you plan to participate in further courses of erp4students’ portfolio?
• Do you plan to recommend erp4students to your friends and peers?
4.2 Example for Results of Learners’ Evaluation: Winter Semester 2014/2015
The data for the learners’ evaluation represented in Figure 5 were collected from our active students in
the last winter semester 2014/2015. This evaluation as direct feedback from the learners (our custom-
ers) constitutes the basis and is thus, crucial input for the improvement of our program. However, our
tutors additionally receive directly provided feedback from the learners (in chat, via telephone), which
also is collected and taken into consideration for the further development particularly of our tutoring
services. Further on, the tutors record their observations during the courses’ runtimes for later discus-
sions in the team.
Figure 5: Results of learner evaluation for erp4students
For our online questionnaire, we invited the 2146 registered learners from the winter semester
2014/2015 and asked them for contribution. Eventually, a total of n = 295 completed questionnaires
were returned (13.75 % participation rate). The average results, were all to be found in the positive in-
terval of the scale. In Figure 5, the average item results are displayed. The items in the bar graphs ex-
actly follow the sequence of questions listed in section 4.1.
The evaluation of both the perceived quality of contents and services revealed very positive in the av-
erage (above +1.5). Even though still positive, the significantly lower evaluations regarding the items
2/3, 7, 10, 11, and 12 encourage further discussion.
Within the items 2 and 3, the learners evaluated the usefulness of the courses for (2) their current field
of study and (3) their future job. While a significantly lower amount of students assigned a direct rela-
tionship to (and thus, benefit for) their current study efforts in their university, most students assigned
a high level of relevance regarding their future jobs. We understand this result as confirmation that
erp4students can support the learners with contents that are not being achieved during their regular
studies. The result additionally shows us that while the learners enter our program from a variety of
different fields, not directly linked to the fields’ core disciplines Information Technology and Information
Systems, they still fully recognize the relevance of the taken courses in their specific future area and
level of employment.
Item 7 refers to the general organizing of the courses. While erp4students technically offers several
supportive measures with the provided platform (like an archive for already passed contents and a
calendar function) and recommendations for the time management, the decisions how to make use of
the offer is up to the learners. As shown in the Learning Culture Survey, which we have conducted in
several countries, students in some countries generally prefer a more guided teaching style than stu-
dents from others [6]. Particularly between Western and Eastern countries, such different perceptions
of individuality and needs for personal support were monitored. We expect related cultural differences
being at least one reason for the result in the evaluation of this item and will further monitor the issue
in order to improve our services.
The evaluation of Item 10 refers to the communication between the learners. The actual work in the
courses, which mainly is related to reading course materials and completing the practical case studies,
is to be individually done by each of the participants. Didactical elements like group tasks and group
work have, so far, not been considered for implementation; in erp4students, no deadlines are defined
apart of the start and end date of the course. This design is meant to provide the maximum level of
flexibility for the students. For the communication amongst the students, erp4students provides a fo-
rum. The learners are encouraged to first share their problems (and possible solutions) with peers in
order to let others participate in the learning process and eventually, the found solutions. In terms of
problem solving, the learners shall just directly involve the tutors, if the peers cannot jointly find an ad-
equate solution. Regarding the quality of such solutions, tutors anyways permanently monitor the fo-
rum, moderate when discussion stands still, and intervene if a discussion moves into the wrong direc-
tion. However, some students just have a very limited time frame for the completion of their courses
and thus, require immediate support from the tutors. Additionally, in some cultures, tutor-support gen-
erally is considered to have a higher quality than peer-support, and showing peers weaknesses like
the lack of understanding, is considered unacceptable behavior. In the context of erp4students, it is
yet unclear to which extent either cultural or individual preferences influence the learners’ social atti-
tudes and the frequency of their postings within the forum. We will further monitor the issue.
Item 11 is related to a possible direction of further development of the erp4student service offers. It
asks the learners if they would like the erp4students-platform to move its focus to social networking,
providing functionalities as commonly known from Facebook or the German student-portal StudiVZ [7].
With an average 0.36, the answers of the learners were rather indifferent. What we learned from these
answers was that the students obviously follow a very specific purpose when booking our courses,
which does not necessarily include peer-to-peer communication or socializing. As consequence, we
currently do not need to implement further opportunities for social networking and/or peer-to-peer
communication. However, particularly in terms of social interaction, our current learners’ perceptions
might not reflect the needs of future Asian students. With our intended expansion of erp4students to
the Asian context, the implementation of more social functionalities might still turn out to be helpful for
the students and thus, necessary to implement.
Item 12 again confirms our assumption that the students select distinct courses with a very specific
purpose and that the workload of the courses is perceived massive enough not to fall into a “certifi-
cate-collection-fever” like monitored in other programs. Our learners are fully happy and justified proud
that they successfully managed to complete the chosen courses. Anyways, particularly in cases where
students passed a beginner course where an advanced course is available, we expect planned repeti-
tive participations.
5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLANS
ERP4students shows that extra-occupational content offers can sustainably help to implement the Bo-
logna process and support universities (and students) to offer application-related education without
having to give up their very basic claim for long-term sustainability.
The students, on the other hand, clearly express their need for such opportunities in general and the
value of erp4students for their future job chances in particular. Even in a context like Germany, where
university education generally is expected to being free of charge, the students are willed to pay man-
ageable prices for additional training offers; provided that the offers as well as the pricing are consid-
ered to be reasonable. In erp4students we managed to claim such a reasonable pricing by openly
comparing the original prices for the technically adequate original SAP courses. Additionally, the
learners in erp4students have the chance to experience a lot of personal support from their tutors and
have a lot of time to spend and experience within the original SAP-developers environment; which
they highly value.
For the future, we plan to implement further courses, translate existing courses to additional lan-
guages, and we aim to involve students from not yet considered regions of the world. In order to
steadily go on writing a success story, we plan to further monitor the cultural perceptions and attitudes
of our learners in order to best possible support them with our course design and particularly, to pre-
vent causing recognized cultural conflicts.
We would like to invite professors and universities around the world to recommend our program to
their students and to directly contact us in order to discuss about possible opportunities for coopera-
tive activities.
We further on would like to encourage other institutions to design similar offers for students and to
publically share their experiences with the community.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
For more information please visit the website of erp4students and/or contact us directly. We are happy
to help you further and look forward establishing any kind of cooperation:
[Link]
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