April is here, which means Spring has arrived in Portland, bringing with a little sunshine, lots of tulips, and some great new features for our customers.
A New Way to Buy: Introducing OpenSesame Plus
OpenSesame Plus is NOW available! OpenSesame Plus is our new subscription based model for purchasing OpenSesame courses (similar to Netflix, but for your training needs). For one low monthly price, OpenSesame Plus subscribers receive unlimited access to a curated offering of courses from many of our top providers. Courses cover topics on business skills, compliance, technology, and more.
You can now browse courses, prices, features, and pay instantly from from the OpenSesame Plus page. Once you’ve purchased OpenSesame Plus, you can pick and choose which learners receive which courses, grant access to the entire library, or view reports on what training your learners are taking.
OpenSesame Plus is a great option for companies seeking out training on a wide variety of topics for their learners, but don’t want to worry about individual course costs or user counts for specific courses. Courses in OpenSesame Plus can be delivered via your LMS (SCORM), or directly on OpenSesame via our CourseCloud system.
Sellers: Link up Your Google+ Account
We just added the ability to setup Google Authorship on your OpenSesame account. This means that you can link content that you publish (your courses, blog posts, etc.) to your Google+ profile. Simply set up your Google+ Authorship one time, and we’ll do the rest.
Why link your content? The goal of this new capability is to distinguish and validate your content in search results.
How to setup your Google+ authorship? To set this up on your account, you will first need a Google+ account profile. We recommend that you upload a high quality headshot and fill out some profile information about you. Once you have a Google+ account, simply login to your OpenSesame account > Go to My Account > Scroll down to the Google+ Authorship section > Click on the header to expand the instructions > Follow instructions > Save account.
CourseCloud Customers: Easily Add Existing Users
If you are using CourseCloud to invite users to your courses, then your job just got a lot easier. We have added an “Existing Users” tab to the CourseCloud pages. This feature allows you to invite any existing users that you have invited in the past, with one click. We are hoping that this will save you a lot of time if you invite the same learners (eg: your employee list) over and over again across multiple courses.
Sellers: Course Preview Videos
For sellers who want to provide a preview video on courses, we now support this. If you have developed a video preview for your course, you can provide the video file to your account manager, and we’ll get it added to your course for you. These videos will play directly on your course page. Not sure what a course video is or looks like? Think…movie trailer for YOUR course! It’s a chance to show off the best features of your course and speak to the features and benefits of why a buyer should choose your course over the competition.
Lots of new tools to explore! We hope that you check some of them out. Feel free to contact your account manager or our support team if you have any questions about any of the products or features above. We’re here to help!