Purpose: New teaching concepts in IS are highly relevant to deliver practical skills to IS students, as demanded by business practice. There are different approaches for providing knowledge. The authors differentiate between teacher-centered and learner-centered approaches when designing new IS courses. The latter is characterized by creating learning environments, where students work on a solution for a given problem. Since nearly every company integrates its processes in enterprise systems, the authors consider the teaching of ERP as particularly relevant for business practice. Hence, the authors present the design of an ERP laboratory-based master IS courses to deliver practical and technical system knowledge. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: The main research methods to achieve the research goals are aligned with a design science approach. For evaluation, data were gathered by a questionnaire-based survey. Findings: The authors benchmarked different issues in both classes and finally came to the conclusion that learner-centered approaches on the one hand are characterized by a lot more effort for students but on the other hand lead to a deeper understanding of a topic area and additionally boost class attendance. Originality/value: Thus, this paper presents new possibilities for delivering practical and technical skills to IS master students, which is important to IS teachers, faculties and also practitioners.