At Odoo, the philosophy is simple: practice lies at the heart of learning. EPHEC, a Belgian university college, adopts the same approach, which is why it launched the Odoo Project. As part of this initiative, second-year bachelor’s students in e-Business are tasked with designing a fully functional e-commerce website for a fictional company.
This project reflects EPHEC’s commitment to providing a learning experience rooted in the realities of the professional world. It highlights the often-underestimated complexity of creating an e-commerce website and emphasizes the importance of multidisciplinary expertise. Every aspect, from inventory management and user experience to legal regulations and digital marketing, must be meticulously integrated. To help students navigate these challenges, three professors collaborate, each bringing specific expertise to ensure a comprehensive and integrated approach.
What's the Odoo Project?
From the start of their bachelor’s program in e-Business, EPHEC students benefit from a collaboration with Odoo that enhances their learning journey. During their first year, students explore the business world through a lecture followed by a visit to Odoo’s offices in Louvain-la-Neuve. This experience is enriched by a fun activity in the LabOdoo, a truck transformed into a mini-company, offering an interactive immersion into the professional environment.
The Odoo Project truly takes shape in the second year, during the second semester. Students are tasked with creating a functional e-commerce website to sell the products and services of a fictional company they design. Based on the SCRUM methodology, the project spans six intensive weeks, structured into weekly sprints. Students work in randomly assigned groups, simulating real-world business conditions.
Throughout the six weeks, professors alternate between theoretical lessons and personalized guidance to answer students’ questions while encouraging them to find solutions independently. While the professors share a similar teaching approach, each focuses on a specific domain essential to building an e-commerce website. professors at the EPHEC Louvain-la-Neuve campus shared their experiences and teaching strategies, providing insight into their approach. These methods and content are also applied by professors at EPHEC campus in Woluwe, ensuring consistent training across all sites.
Main Components of the 4 Courses
Business and Internet Law
Boris Hourdeaux, an economic inspector and e-commerce expert, ensures that companies' websites comply with regulations. Drawing on his field experience, he brings real-world relevance to his classes on business and internet law. He starts with an introduction to business law, covering key topics such as choosing a legal structure, selecting a name and corporate identity, and creating a fictional headquarters.
Next, students imagine their own fictional company and learn the legal basics required to create an e-commerce platform, including cookie management, withdrawal rights, and legal notices—all elements they must integrate into their e-commerce website.
E-Commerce Practices
This course follows training on CMS usage and focuses on optimization and best practices specific to e-commerce. Led by Stéphane Van Lippevelde, it teaches students essential elements for creating an e-commerce website. The course encourages them to consider key aspects such as the sales funnel, product pages, and product catalogs.
Integrated E-Management Software and IT Project Management
In these courses, students learn the principles of ERP systems and the benefits of integrated solutions like Odoo. They are immersed in a simulation through the Scale-Up Business Game that places them in the role of a CEO tasked with creating a company through various practical scenarios.
Christian Cognaux, an expert in supply chain management, also guides students in implementing manufacturing, sales, distribution, and delivery operations for their e-commerce project. Unlike his colleagues, who focus on front-end development, Christian teaches back-end e-commerce mastery. Students learn to apply concepts covered in other courses through his guidance.
A Holistic Approach to Learning
To ensure the project runs smoothly, professors coordinate their lessons to maintain consistency across the curriculum. Some concepts taught in one class may affect other aspects of the project. For instance, Stéphane has had to adjust certain topics due to their complexity in back-end configurations.
Business law, being more distinct, requires less interaction with other professors. However, there are instances where students have yet to learn how to implement the legal elements taught by Boris. In such cases, he asks them to write a summary of the legal concepts or texts to be integrated, which they can add later once the technical aspects are addressed in the management software course.
After six weeks, students have an additional two weeks to finalize their project. The examination is divided into two parts: one for e-commerce practices and management software courses and another for the law course. During these exams, students present their e-commerce website through a consumer journey, demonstrating their understanding of class concepts.
Each part is independent, meaning students who fail one section only need to retake that specific course. At the end of the presentation, students also share their feedback on Odoo, providing valuable insights to a Product Owner of Odoo, who is part of the jury. The presentation concludes with a Q&A session where the jury questions students about their choices or asks for clarifications.
Feedback from Students and Professors
Students generally appreciate the Odoo Project because it allows them to work on a concrete project. Eva, a former EPHEC student now working as a sales representative at Odoo, shares her experience: she particularly enjoyed group work, which allowed her to meet new people and leverage everyone’s strengths as each member specialized in a specific aspect of the project.
What I really liked was that we had to figure things out on our own. I know some people found it difficult because they would ask the professor questions, and the professor would tell them to look it up in the documentation. But it allowed us to truly manage on our own, search for information ourselves, and do some testing, because that’s how you truly learn.
Her mastery of Odoo proved valuable in securing her current job. During her interview at Odoo, she was tasked with performing an improvised demonstration. Even without prior experience with the specific applications requested, her knowledge of Odoo and the software’s intuitiveness enabled her to complete the task with ease. Two other members of her group also found jobs where they use Odoo—one as a partner and the other as an implementer for clients.
Admittedly, some students felt frustrated when they couldn’t realize their initial ideas due to the functional limitations of the CMS without coding. However, this experience helped them understand real-world challenges and the importance of finding alternative solutions within the software.
On the professors’ side, Odoo is well-integrated into their courses. They appreciate its simplicity and the ability to quickly create a functional e-commerce website. Additionally, Odoo’s free access is a significant advantage. Recognizing the limited alternatives in intuitive software for training purposes, professors see Odoo as a valuable teaching resource.
Key Takeaways
The Odoo Project at EPHEC embodies a great initiative for practical and collaborative learning. Through this project, students learn to design a complete e-commerce platform, tackling real-world challenges and developing essential cross-disciplinary skills for their future professional journeys. An inspiring project, where theory and practice come together to train the next generation of e-Business specialists.
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The Odoo Project at EPHEC: A Hands-On Immersion in e-Business