Everyone! OPEN vhb courses are open online courses from Bavarian universities and universities of applied sciences that any interested individual can use for free. You don’t need to be enrolled at a university or hold a university entrance qualification. The only requirement to participate in OPEN vhb courses is that you register on the OPEN vhb platform (https://open.vhb.org/?lang=en) and enrol in the specific course you want to take.

No! No fees are charged for participating in OPEN vhb courses. OPEN vhb courses are open online courses from Bavarian universities and universities of applied sciences that any interested individual can use for free.

OPEN vhb courses are open online courses from Bavarian universities and universities of applied sciences. The courses are developed and offered by professors at these institutions of higher education.

University-level material is presented in OPEN vhb courses. The requirements vary from course to course. If any course recommends special prerequisites, you will find this information in the course description.

You do have the opportunity to receive a confirmation of participation from most OPEN vhb courses. No grades or ECTS credits are listed in confirmations of participation. Usually, to receive a confirmation of participation, you will have to pass various online tests or self-assessments. If all of the required tests are passed, the confirmation of participation can be downloaded as a pdf document.

As part of the OPEN vhb platform’s concept, you cannot acquire certificates with grades or certificates that are eligible for ECTS credits.

In some OPEN vhb courses, you do have the opportunity to collect so-called Open Badges (see https://openbadges.org/) for completing certain tasks or assignments. If so, you will find this information in the course description.

In most cases, OPEN vhb courses are unsupervised, self-study environments. In some cases, OPEN vhb courses can be supervised by tutors, if the course providers decide to offer this service. In most courses, participants are provided a discussion forum where they can communicate and exchange openly amongst themselves.

You can register at https://open.vhb.org/login/index.php?lang=en with your email address using the web form or with your personal Google account.

If you belong to one of our member universities (students, academic staff, academic support staff), you can also register with your existing personal university ID.

Shortly after you have registered as a user via the web form using your e-mail address or with your personal Google account, you should receive an email with a link to confirm your account. If you have not received this email, check again in the junk or spam folders in your email inbox (= the inbox of the email address you used to register on the OPEN vhb platform). Sometimes the confirmation email is inadvertently identified as spam/junk.

If there is no confirmation email in the spam/junk folders, please write an email about this and send it to open@vhb.org from the email account you used to register on the OPEN vhb platform. We will then manually confirm your user account.

Please note: If you are a member of one of our member universities (students, academic staff, academic support staff) and have registered as a user on the OPEN vhb platform with your personal university ID, you will not receive a separate e-mail to confirm your user account.

After you have registered on the OPEN vhb platform and logged in, you can find an “Enrol” button in the description for each course currently on offer. Clicking this button will bring you directly to the course environment.

If you have registered on the OPEN vhb platform with your Google account, go to https://open.vhb.org/login/index.php?lang=en to log in to the platform and click on the "Login with your Google account" button at the bottom of this page. Use your personal Google username and password to log in.

If you belong to a vhb member university (student, academic staff, academic support staff) and have registered on the OPEN vhb platform with your personal university ID, go to https://open.vhb.org/login/index.php?lang=en to log in to the platform and select your home university in the middle of this page (“University login”). Then click on the button "Login with your university ID". You can log in with your existing personal university ID.

In the past, you belonged to one of our member universities (student, academic staff, academic support staff) and registered on the OPEN vhb platform using your personal university ID. Now you can no longer log in because you have left the university.

In this case, please send us an e-mail to open@vhb.org and tell us your university e-mail address that you used to have at your university. We will then convert your existing OPEN vhb user account to a local account so that you can log in at https://open.vhb.org/login/index.php?lang=en using username and password instead of your university ID.

OPEN vhb courses are usually offered for a period of at least five years. You can start working on any course on offer at any time.

Because the course providers aim to keep their courses up to date, it may happen that a course is paused or access is restricted for a few weeks for revision. If a revision is scheduled, you will be notified in a timely manner both in the course itself and in the course description.

If a course is being removed from the catalogue, this would be communicated in the course itself and in the course description approximately six months before.

If you would like to end your participation in a course and no longer be listed as a participant, you can end your enrolment (unenrol) in a course at any time. To do this, click on the "Participants" menu tab in the course (above the chapter images) and then on the button “Unenrol me from [course name]”.

If you are logged in to the OPEN vhb platform, you will find your user profile in the dropdown menu in the top right corner of your browser screen (click on your profile picture or your name shortcut and then on “Profile”). Inside your user profile, you will find the option "Delete my account" in the “Privacy and policies” section. Here you can delete your user account including all personal data.

An overview of the courses you are currently enrolled in can be found by logging in to the OPEN vhb platform and then clicking on "Dashboard" in the top right corner.

If you forgot your password, you can request a new password for your account via this link: https://open.vhb.org/login/forgot_password.php?lang=en.

Please note: Requesting a new password is only possible if you have registered on the OPEN vhb platform with your email address using the web form. If you registered on the OPEN vhb platform with your Google account or with your university ID, we cannot issue you a new password. In these cases, you can log in to the OPEN vhb platform with your personal Google username and password or with your existing personal university ID.

There are regular problems with the appearance/display of OPEN vhb courses when using devices from Apple (iPhone, iPad, MacBook), in particular when the course is being viewed in Safari. Course elements (for example, videos or tests) are sometimes incompletely or not at all displayed.

Should this situation arise, you may compensate or at least reduce such problems, if you use a different browser on your Apple device (e.g., Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox) to participate in the course. If this does not improve the problem, unfortunately, you can only complete the course using another (non-Apple) device.

We make every effort to ensure all OPEN vhb courses work smoothly and correctly with the current versions of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox from a technical point of view.  If you are using one of the three browsers mentioned above and nonetheless experience technical problems in a course, please check first, if you are using the most current version (you should regularly check if you need updates for your browser for security reasons). If you are using the most current version and the problems persist, please send us an email at open@vhb.org describing the problem (ideally including screenshots).