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).

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.

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.

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.

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.