Development of an ERP System Design Course to Improve Students' Learning Outcomes

Abstract

This paper describes the design and evaluation of an ERP system design course, which utilizes experiential learning theory along with open ERP sys-tem to provide the students with a holistic and cost-free learning environ-ment. The objective of the course is to familiarize students with the ERP se-lection and implementation life-cycle. When designing the pedagogical framework, the goal was to help students, especially those with little to no working experience to acquire the necessary knowledge, and develop the practical technical experience. Additionally, it was necessary to help students appreciate the depth and issues involved in the ERP system selection and implementation life-cycle. Lectures, case discussions, system demos with interactive labs, and group projects were used all together to enable in depth learning of the proposed topics. We focus on open source ERP system to provide the students with the required hands-on experience, and also to demonstrate that such approach can be utilized even by low resource universities. This paper includes details of the proposed framework. The proposed framework was taught and evaluated in a 1-semester graduate level course at the university of Jeddah, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The course design was in-directly assessed using a survey, and the results revealed the positive impact that the proposed framework had on students’ learning outcomes. The results of the assessment support that experiential based learning using open source ERP systems can lead to improved learning outcome.