Code of Conduct

Learning with respect – our community on openHPI

At openHPI, we want one thing above anything else: to combine valuable learning content with an excellent learning experience and make it accessible to everyone – with exciting courses and an active learning community. All on one platform where everyone can feel comfortable.

openHPI thrives on the interaction between learners and instructors, on your questions, ideas, and discussions. Different people come together here – with different experiences, backgrounds and perspectives. To ensure that everyone feels safe, respected, and taken seriously, fair treatment of one another is essential. Our shared values ensure that discussions remain constructive, contributions are meaningful, and we can create a good learning atmosphere for everyone.

Be open, listen to each other, remain fair – and make openHPI a place where learning is fun.

Our interaction on openHPI – in a nutshell

Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. Be friendly, respectful, helpful – and always objective. Racism, sexism, hatred, threats, insults, bullying, provocations, and hurtful content have no place here.

Use openHPI as it is intended – for learning and exchanging ideas. Spam, advertising, or intentional disruptions will be removed.

Learn fairly. Follow the course instructions. Only use the permitted tools, work independently, and cite your sources when using content from others.
Sharing solutions or cheating ultimately harms the collective learning success – so stay fair and learn more in the process.

All learning materials on openHPI are intended for you and your use here only. Our materials are published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Any use outside the terms of the license is prohibited.

Safety first. For your own protection, do not share personal information with others.

Have you seen something that is not okay? Please do not react on your own —report it via the help desk. This will help keep the platform fair and safe for everyone.

Anyone who violates our common values will face consequences – from deletion of posts to warnings to bans or expulsions.
In serious cases, we will also inform schools, institutions, or legal authorities.

Composing your own postings

  • Search before writing. Many topics already exist. Avoid repetition by using the search function first.
  • Stay on topic. While even with subject-oriented topics it’s possible for a off-topic remark to occur, these comments shouldn’t be the main component of a posting
  • Formulate your questions and answers precisely and understandably.
  • Name your sources when you quote or refer to other Internet pages.
  • Choose meaningful headlines when creating threads.

Netiquette

  • Stay friendly and factual.
  • Be cautious with humor and irony.
  • Give Feedback.

Of course it’s possible in a forum that from time to time posts and topics can turn up that contradict - more or less strongly - these guidelines. On the one hand, the points mentioned are highly dependent on personal interpretation and, on the other hand, nobody’s perfect.

The following behavior will not be tolerated on openHPI

  • Personal conflicts carried out in the public sphere
  • "Trolling" and "flaming", i.e. releasing posts or topics that are intended to deliberately provoke strong negative or emotional reactions - Spam, i.e. posts with e.g. advertising contents - Harassing or threatening other participants - Language which is hurtful, threatening, insulting, defamatory, obscene, hateful or racist

Depending on its severity, a violation of these rules may result in a warning or a temporary or permanent exclusion from the platform.

How to use the forum features: topics and votings

Writing a post in the course forum is quite easy to do and we strongly encourage our learners to use the course forum since active interacting with your fellow students will contribute to your learning experience and progress in contrast to only passively consume the learning materials. Eventhough, the more participants are using the course forum, the more important it is to keep it easy to navigate through.

This is why you should reflect about the purpose of your post for a moment and ask yourself if the question you want to ask already exists in a similar version. You might find an already existing discussion topic about your issue when browsing and searching the forum. In this case you can respond to this topic or vote it up to indicate "The same issue is also important to me!"

If you cannot find your question in the forum, please start a new topic by clicking on "start a new topic" (for details see below).

Voting posts up & down

![enter image description here][1] You and other learners can vote posts up or down to express agreement or disagreement:

Each user can only give one vote per post but a decision can be taken back and changed at any time by choosing the opposite vote. You can vote for posts as well as for answers.

Starting a new topic

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Clicking on the orange button on top of the forum page will open an edit form to create a new discussion topic.

Marking answers as correct or helpful

![enter image description here][3]

If you have asked a question, you (and the teaching team) can label one of the answers as correct or helpful by clicking the check mark.

This helps the forum community to quickly see that there is no further action required and it will help peers to find the right answer if they have a similar question, as the posting will be labeled as “answered” in the list with all forum postings.

Tagging threads

If you create a new topic, please make use of the tagging functionality. Best practice is to add one meaningful tag to provide the context for the topic. These tags will be displayed in the discussion forum list.

Pinned threads

Some postings with important discussions or containing important information by the instructors can be pinned ![enter image description here][4] which means they will appear at the top of the forum list.

Follow topics

You can follow a discussion topic, i.e. you will get an email notification if there is is a new answer to the posting. If you started a topic yourself or respond to a topic of another participant, you follow this posting automatically. If you don't like to follow any posting any more, you can easily turn it off in your profile settings.

This page was last changed at Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:47:42 +0000.