Our openSAP course Rapid Deployment of SAP Solutions was designed to explain how to use SAP Rapid Deployment solutions by taking advantage of SAP Best Practices and content to deploy SAP innovations and solutions. To explore the rapid-deployment solutions portfolio we decided to modify the standard openSAP course structure and we offered five strategic solution domains in weeks 3 and 4. The participants had the freedom to select one or more from these solution domains. They were required to complete only one solution, but they could learn from as many solutions as they were interested in. This flexibility prevented us from conducting a final exam in this course. We were very interested to see how participants would consume this flexible structure and whether they would engage and remain committed until the end of the course despite the lack of a final exam.
Another feature specific of this openSAP course was related to the target group. This course was designed mainly for SAP Partner employees in business development, pre-sales, delivery management, or similar. However, we didn’t restrict the registration only to SAP Partners and we offered this course to consultants involved in the deployment of SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and/or SAP Best Practices, and to everyone interested in learning about rapid-deployment solutions offered by SAP. It was important for us to see how many SAP Partner employees participated to this course. Unfortunately the majority of participants enrolled using their private e-mail and we therefore could not identify their affiliation.
Please take a look at the key statistics that we have created at the end of this course:
- The course started on May, 14 and ended on June, 18
- 7,830 participants were enrolled on day 1 of the course.
- 10,314 participants were enrolled half way through the course.
- 12,179 participants were enrolled when the last assignment ended.
- 2,847 participants actively participated in the course.
- We have issued 2,060 graded records of achievement (20,0% of enrolled participants)
- Approximately 55,000 videos were watched.
- Approximately 60,000 tests were submitted.
- Approximately 450 contributions have been posted in the discussion forum.
- 11% of the participants were SAP employees.
- The other 89% came from outside SAP.
A closer analysis of the participants from outside SAP shows the following distribution:
- 8% (1,035) of the participants were students.
- 11% (1,342) of participants were SAP Partner or Customer employees.
- For 70% (8,523) of the participants we could not identify their affiliation because they enrolled to this course by using their private e-mail.
From the 11% of participants from SAP Partners or Customers we could see the following distribution:
- 94% (1,203) of participants were employees from SAP Partners.
- 6% (76) of participants were employees from customers/others companies.
The following chart shows the distribution of the number of participants per SAP Partners. We were positively impressed to see that companies such as IBM, Wipro, Capgemini, and Hewlett-Packard were represented by more than 100 employees.
The following chart depicts the geographical distribution of the course participants:
As with previous openSAP courses, the top 3 countries were India (32,3%), USA (14,5%) and Germany (7,1%). The participants came from 133 countries.
Let us have a look at the age distribution of the course participants.
This graph shows a peak between 29 and 33 year olds, which might lead to the conclusion that the course has a high interest in a business environment.
Let us analyze now the impact of the flexible course structure in week 3. The chart below shows how many participants have completed the weekly assignment per solution domain.
We can see that the solutions SAP ERP Foundation Extension and SAP HANA attracted the most interest. This was expected because of the nature of these topics. SAP HANA is a new innovation and a strategic development for SAP, while the SAP ERP Foundation Extension extends the capabilities of SAP ERP by including innovations in the areas of application, mobile, user experience, and real-time analytics running on the SAP HANA platform. On the other hand SAP CRM attracted less interest. This could be explained that the ABAP-based Deployment part of this solution domain was also part of the SAP ERP Foundation Extension solution.
We are happy to see that most of the participants liked the flexible approach for week 3 and focused on more than one of the solution domains.
Another interesting fact was to see whether we could keep the participants engaged over the 4 weeks of the course. The graph below shows how many participants submitted their homework per course week.
Assuming that in week 3 participants completed 2.5 solutions on average, we can see that from 2,552 participants that completed week 1 we have lost only 28,6%. So, in week 4 of the course we had 1,821 participants that submitted the last assignment. Seeing that the majority of the participants stayed engaged until the end tells us that the content presented in this course was captivating.
In summary, we can say that the participants enjoyed the course and appreciated the flexible approach and the opportunity to choose between one or more solution domains. Even though we experienced some technical issues regarding the “My progress” section which did not reflect the participants’ status, the overall feedback was positive.
We are also very happy that we could attract a large number of employees from SAP Partners in the first run of this course. This opens new perspectives regarding the enablement process and knowledge transfer for our ecosystem.
Please be aware that this blog post conveys my personal interpretation of the metrics we have gathered.
What do you make of the data I have presented? I look forward to your comments.
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