OpenSesame Review

Pros

We love the access to diverse e-learnings, the continuous upgrades like smart lists, and the amazing customer engagement support team. OpenSesame continues to step up its game.

Cons

Well they have a great variety of courses we are always hoping for more, especially in our global company languages (we have over a dozen languages).

Love OpenSesame

My overall experience has been amazing. The product has delivered time and time again, our employees have loved the content, and the support has been top notch.

Pros

What I love the most about OpenSesame is that they not only have great content to pull from (and plenty of it), but their support team behind the product is amazing. They can help curate content for you, as well as suggest content that works for your needs.

Cons

With some languages, there seems to be more limited options. But they are working on growing this all the time.

More does not mean better

We were implementing an LMS and wanted pre packaged content available for deployment in order to give learners a starting point for development while we design our learning programs. There was a lot of effort required to review content. Customer service during implementation was not ideal because we had to go through LMS vendor and then often repeat to OS. There’s wasn’t enough collaboration between the companies so we felt we were initiating conversations most of time. The follow up from OS was not great at all, long delays in getting responses. Content needs to be vetted better. More does not mean better. In the end, we were able to offer content for learning and we are continuing to review and iterate our program.

Pros

There are a variety of topics in the library in which the company can choose for learning. There was a pre built integration with LMS which made the integration quicker. That doesn’t suggest the integration process was effective. It was however relatively quick in that it did not require any overnight production runs to see changes between. Content updates could be manually pushed into LMS and they appeared almost immediately.

Cons

The quality of some videos are not as you would expect, some have heavy animation so it comes across cartoonish and takes away from the concept. There was no easy way to catalog content into customer categories. And no categorization by content type. There was no easy way to review the content. The review process requires you to launch over 20,000 content assets to preview one by one for appropriateness for your company. Not all publishers are created equal. Of the 20000+ content available there was quite a bit related to leisure topic areas very professional. Content include mostly videos versus elearning courses that actually have assessments and completion metrics. Filtering functionality was not as accurate as expected, especially when filtering by language origin. The LMS integration connector synch process was clunky due to the multiple steps that had to be taken. Customer has to initiate the synch manually versus it being an automated process. Limited reporting capabilities.

Positive experience with OpenSesame for past 3 years

Pros

There is a wide variety of training content available from multiple publishers and OpenSesame is constantly added more. Another big pro is the option to demo courses before buying them. It's very helpful that demo courses come with the option to assign to multiple users which enables my entire team to review the training before we are sure we want to purchase. Their support team has also been fantastic - response time is always quick and they are sure to follow up if they haven't received an updated within 24-48 hours.

Cons

In the past there has been limited availability of international versions, as well as alternative languages for those international courses. However, within the last year, there has been an increase in availability, likely due to demand.

E-Learninmg Advantages

Great, always seeking more content

Pros

Easy to use, very intuitive and user friendly

Cons

Not necessarily the software functionality but am always seeking more and broader content

A lot of choices

Pros

Opensesame has a lot of choices in their courseware. We have found many modules to use for our company.

Cons

Sometimes it is hard to find what you are looking for. I just wished the courses were more standardized.

Vast learning library at your fingertips

Overall we are very happy with OpenSesame. Our support rep, is great! She makes sure we know about all of the upcoming changes and she is great at getting us answers to questions we have. She is also just a nice person to work with.

Pros

There is a lot of content available on a lot of topics. The variety of formats, traditional eLearn, video, etc. are good; our learners like options. I also like that you can sort by provider, seat time, and language. Importing courses into our LMS is a breeze with the connection tools.

Cons

The interface is clunky and it can be challenging to find what you are looking for. As an example, there are a lot of classes tied together in a series but it can be very difficult to find all of the classes in those series.

Looking at options beyond company Plus subscription for technical training pay as you go.

Look forward to discussion with customer success mgr

Pros

Large catalog Content fresh multiple content providers swapped out courses that aren't being used qtrly

Cons

Not being able to use a coupon system for prepaid. Like a gift card so a business unit can purchase in advance and provide to employees on a case by case need for paying for content outside of the Plus subscription. Not having course meta data as part of the .zip package file Still looking into any issues we may have found with flash based content.

Open Sesame

Pros

Pros: Plentiful course catalog Dedicated customer service representatives New courses monthly.

Cons

Cons: Some outdated courses

Great Courses

Pros

I like that they have a wide variety of courses on different subjects from different vendors. You have everything from safety to compliance to soft skills or professional development courses.

Cons

Wish there was more options for compliance courses.

Engaging your workforce with tools to learn and grow.

I had to start from scratch with a new LMS, content provider and new Performance Management concept. Open sesame curated the content with me and had a cool survey I took prior to the start so we could customize content for my company and our culture. We were able to do this and launch within 3 months encompassing several different divisions with many needs.

Pros

IT is the customer service element and the outstanding service, support, idea exchange and open door to all of the talent at OpenSesame. The programs and support materials are awesome but the soft services they provide make them our vendor of choice. I recently was challenged to do an RFP to see what was new and cool out there. And I was again wowed by the quality of the products they offer. We are global and have a need for many languages and OpenSesame's offerings are spot on!

Cons

There are no real cons they are so many offerings. My one need is executive book summaries! Hoping they offer something like that in the future.

We LOVE our Open Sesame Plus Catalog

Be sure to utilize your Open Sesame Content Curation Team! They have been a massive help to us over and over and over. Our latest requests have come back with over 25 courses, with some topic areas as high as 70+ courses! There is no way that we would be able to comb through all of the courses and create these types of lists.

Pros

- literally thousands of courses - multi-language support - hundreds of topics relate-able to our business and our employee's needs - the new Smart List feature is spectacular!

Cons

We use the Open Content Network interface with our LMS. One of the Content Providers changed over their titles from Flash to HTML 5. There was no quick and easy swap of the titles to update to the newer version. We had to re-import the updated titles and then manually de-activate the "old" titles in our LMS. There has to be a smoother process for this.

OpenSesame -- Opening the Door to our LMS

We are able to send courses that we previously had employees teach around to all of our offices. Saving us time and money.

Pros

It is very easy to look through courses and see which ones have the best reviews. Also, clicking on a course gives you all the information needed including quizzes, time to complete, etc.

Cons

This may be more related to our LMS but it would be nice if the picture of the course could carry over to the software we use for our LMS. Now I have to locate the picture, save it, and add it to the course separately.

Perfect for our needs

Open Sesame fits our needs very well. Our content needs are so vast various that we can find just about everything we need.

Pros

I love the search function and the ability to create lists. The smart list feature is amazing! It saves me so much time searching for courses. I love the course demo feature as well. Being able to see the course first adds great value to me.

Cons

I dont like the fact that I have to title the SCORM files after i download them. This step is quite time consuming when I have to download and re-title each file. However, I have found a quick system for completing this step. Would like to see in the future a fix for that.

Excellent support as a client

Very positive interactions with OpenSesame and their support team. This is not an organization that will try to sell you a contract and then leave you high and dry. It's extremely evident they want you to succeed with their tool.

Pros

The customer support for OpenSesame has been phenomenal. They are always ready to help think through how we can maximize utilization and troubleshoot issues.

Cons

Not enough content available in languages outside of English. This has been difficult as we are a global organization.

Great Resource for Small L&D Team

Pros

Open Sesame provides a ton of content that can be curated and added to our LMS. Our L&D team consists of 2 employees supporting over 5000 employees, so we don't have much time for content development. When someone asks for content on a particular topic, we are able to easily find a course, download the SCORM file, and add it to our LMS.

Cons

It would be nice for system admins to be able to preview an entire course before adding it/purchasing it.

OpenSesame is Great :)

Everyone I have worked with has been wonderful.

Pros

There are tons of courses to choose from and OpenSesame makes it easy to build a program with their curation services.

Cons

Nothing, I like everything about the product and service. I have gone to two conferences where they were and if I wasn't using the product I would have after meeting them.

Great Value & Variety

Pros

The vast catalog that is part of OpenSesame+ Amazing customer service.

Cons

Hard to search for courses and administrative interface.

Bad Customer Experience-No Values

Extremely negative and they don’t provide any kind of support. The customer experience staff has no experience in supporting their clients. The doesn’t care about your business after they sign contract and get their money.

Pros

Nothing. There products have no quality.

Cons

Their platform can not integrate fully with our LMS.

yearly training

required to use this for yearly updates/training-despise using it

Pros

it covers what is necessary from a training perspective

Cons

God awful slow, not user friendly in the least bit. Easiest to go to next page, then go do something, and come back, read, repeat. It needs to have a button to speed things up.

Open Sesame

The team is very nice but not impressed with ease of use of the product, therefore we don't use it enough to feel our value is being met - despite what Open Sesame says.

Pros

I like the multiple vendor offerings and topics.

Cons

The system is very slow and hard to navigate.

Selections

Pros

Great variety of topics selections to choose from on a daily basis. I would recommend to my colleagues.

Cons

It would be nice to see more time relevant topics as it happens in the workplace and around the world very timely.

Very Accessible Learning Tool

Pros

The ease of use and ability for employees to quickly get their training needs sourced for those living remotely.

Cons

Sometimes the training providers are not the best or outdated materials. Especially for data and coding training, not up to the market standards.

Ease of Use

Reporting accurate data.

Pros

I like the workbook examples that are provided, the speaker is clear and concise.

Cons

I would like it if the quiz factor were not so confusing.