Unfortunately, no. A separate registration is necessary to use OPEN vhb courses, even if you already have a CLASSIC vhb account and have participated or are participating in curriculum-anchored courses from our CLASSIC catalogue.

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. There are three ways to register: registration via web form with your email address, registration with your Google account, or registration with your Facebook account.

Shortly after you have registered on the OPEN vhb platform, 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 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.

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 or Facebook account, go to https://open.vhb.org/login/index.php?lang=en and click on the Google or Facebook button in the column on the right to log in to the platform. Use your personal Google or Facebook username and password to log in.

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, find the link “Unenrol from this course” at the bottom of the participant list within the course. Clicking this link will end your enrolment as a participant in that class. After that you will no longer be listed as a course participant.

If you are logged in on the OPEN vhb platform, you will find your “Profile” in the user dropdown menu in the top, right corner of your browser screen (click on your name). Once you are viewing your profile, you will see the option “Delete my account”. This will allow you to delete your account including all personal data.

An overview of the courses you are currently enrolled in can be found by clicking on your name in the top, right corner of your browser screen and selecting the “Dashboard”.

If you forget 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 via the platform is only possible if you have registered for the OPEN vhb platform using the web form and your email address. If you registered for the OPEN vhb platform using your Google or Facebook account, we cannot issue you a new password. In these cases, use your personal Google or Facebook username and password to log in to the OPEN vhb platform.

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).