Portland, OR – 26 February 2020 – OpenSesame, the elearning innovator, announced iAM Learning was added to its popular OpenSesame Plus subscription to expand its curated library of safety, well-being, and soft skills courses. 

Global 2000 companies leverage the OpenSesame Plus subscription with over 6,000 curated courses—now including iAM Learning’s animated short-format courses—to keep employees safe, motivated, and happy while keeping the organization compliant.

From the creative minds that originally developed the very popular Learning Heroes courses, iAM Learning blends the art of storytelling and stunning animation to bring content to life and engage learners. Using likable characters and captivating stories, iAM Learning courses help enterprise organizations ensure their employees are engaged in learning with bite-sized training content that’s fun, vibrant, and authentic.

“While ever-important, the topic of employee health and safety — particularly mental health — is often hard to broach; yet it remains at the top of every L&D professional’s mind,” said Spencer Thornton, Senior Vice President of Curation at OpenSesame. “iAM Learning’s thoughtful and effective approach to these sensitive topics helps organizations meet compliance requirements as well as also sets up employees for long-term growth and success.”

“Employees need compelling, memorable training to help them upskill quickly as well as keep them safe and engaged throughout their career,” said Tom Moore, Chief Operating Officer of iAM Learning. “ We’re excited that, through our new partnership with OpenSesame, our immersive, bite-sized animated elearning courses will reach more organizations around the world and help them solve their training challenges.”

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame helps develop the world’s most productive and admired workforces. With the most comprehensive catalog of elearning courses from the world’s top publishers, we are here to help you every step of the way, from finding courses, mapping them to your core competencies, syncing them with your LMS to increasing utilization and improving your L&D programs. Not only will you have the flexibility of multiple purchasing options from OpenSesame, you’ll find it simple to use and administer your elearning courses. To learn more, visit www.opensesame.com.

About iAM Learning

iAM Learning is disrupting what you know about learning. Our course designers use high-end animation, lovable characters, and captivating stories to make even the most serious subjects appealing and unforgettable. Transform the way your workforce trains and retains with the bitesize animated elearning library your people will love. What are you waiting for? Visit www.iamlearningcontent.com to learn more.

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To say that L&D runs lean is an understatement. With limited time, budget, and resources, L&D teams like yours are relying more on their trusted content partner for curation to save time, learn about hot training topics, and prepare the organization for the future.

This is where OpenSesame and our team of curation experts can help. We’ve worked with hundreds of organizations like yours helping them find, curate, and deploy courses to learners. Harnessing this experience we’ve created OpenSesame Curated Lists—a quick and easy way for you find expertly curated courses to help your learners hone critical business skills, prepare for a new role, achieve organizational competencies, and more.

Check out the new OpenSesame Curated Lists

With Curated Lists, you’ll save time searching for courses and get a head start with pre-curated learning paths for the most common training challenges. To see the first available Curated Lists, go to www.opensesame.com, click Courses in the page header, and then click View Lists in the new Curated Lists section. Curated Lists are organized into intuitive groupings to help you quickly find the training topics you need, including:

• • Frequently requested learning paths,

  • Introduction to new topics and skills,

  • Advancement in critical business and interpersonal skills, and

  • Preparation for new positions and responsibilities.

At a glance, you can see how many courses are in each Curated List and whether the courses in each List are included in our most popular subscription offering, OpenSesame Plus. Within each Curated List, you’ll be able to see additional information including course ratings, length, publishers, and (when logged in) you can view a course demo if one is available. Our curation experts regularly update Curated Lists to ensure you always have access to the most current and relevant content. You can easily stay up to date with changes to Curated Lists by following your favorite ones. Just click the List and then click the Follow button.Log into your OpenSesame account or, if you’re new to OpenSesame, register to create one. You’ll see the Curated Lists you’re following within My Lists in the All tab as well as the new Following tab.Need to make changes to a Curated List? No problem. Within the List, select Duplicate from the List settings menu (gear icon) to create a copy, enter a list title and description, and click Duplicate. Your new duplicated List can be found in the All and Created tabs. You can now add, remove, and organize courses as needed. Note that duplicated Lists will not reflect any course updates from OpenSesame.From here, Lists you’ve duplicated and modified work like all your other Lists. You can collaborate with stakeholders, collect feedback, view course demos, and easily add courses to your LMS for quick deployment to learners.

We’re here to make your job easier, including curating so you don’t have to. Share with us what other Curated Lists you would like to see in the future by visiting the OpenSesame Community, click the Looking for elearning recommendations topic, and then select the Request new Curated List topics post. Our curation team will review your requests for future Curated Lists.

For more information contact your Customer Success Manager or our Customer Support team.

The post Get a head start on designing your training program with OpenSesame Curated Lists appeared first on OpenSesame.

However, a recent U.S. Department of Labor reported 59% of employers said that accommodations needed by disabled employees cost “absolutely nothing” while 36% experienced a one time cost. The report also states that, “the accommodation ultimately improved interactions with co-workers, the accommodation increased overall company morale, and the accommodation increased overall company productivity.”

The common accommodations considered for a workplace environment are physical and in an office environment, such as elevators and wheelchair ramps. But what about the barriers that make the online world difficult to access? What accommodations should be considered for your business?

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that federal agencies provide software and website accessibility to people with disabilities. Although it is not required for the private sector to comply with 508, it should be in their best interest to do so since it means more people can access their content.

Online considerations

Ensuring adequate online accessibility requires careful consideration of several factors including:

• Is visual content presented in a structure that can be interpreted by screen reading software? Headings to correctly organize the structure of content, using proper alt text for images, using color with care and much more.

• Are your website and softwares accessible for people with impaired hearing? Do your elearning videos include transcripts and/or subtitles? – perhaps consider including sign language videos as well. In addition, make sure to include contact information beyond a phone a number such as a live webchat. Here’s an example of a company doing it right.

• Can your website and other technology be navigated with a keyboard? Even the fanciest of websites are useless to someone who cannot interact with it. Keyboard friendly websites make accessibility possible for those who are unable to use a mouse. Here are a few tips to help make a website keyboard friendly.

Since 508 is not mandatory, many websites and softwares are inaccessible for a large population of individuals with disabilities. Similar to websites, not all elearning courses are going to be accessible, either. Fortunately, OpenSesame has over 3,300 courses that are 508 compliant and include closed captioning, mindful color contrasting, screen reader compatibility, optional transcripts, and more. Top courses include Negotiation: Your Road to Success, Handle Stress and Sexual Harassment Training for Supervisors. OpenSesame also includes a search filter under ‘Course Features’ that allows you to search for courses that are only 508 compliant (see image below).

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Finding the embedded catalog in your LMS

How customers accesses the embedded course catalog differs for each of our LMS partners. As of August 2017, the OpenSesame embedded catalog is available in 12 different LMS including SuccessFactors, Saba, Oracle, BlueVolt, Bridge, Docebo, Totara, SkyPrep, CyberTrain, Accord, Axis, and eFront.  We encourage you to contact your LMS representative to find exactly how to access OpenSesame from directly within your LMS, or contact us to learn more.

Browse

There are a few ways to browse the OpenSesame embedded course catalog. Clicking “Search Courses” will take you to our category browsing page where you can select a subject area you’re interested in or search our course content.

As you browse and search the OpenSesame catalog, we suggest that you add items of interest to OpenSesame Lists that you can later spend time reviewing and refining.  When you’re ready, navigate to your list to click through to each course page, review courses in more detail, and select which items you would like to purchase.

Purchase

You can purchase OpenSesame Plus from within the integration or add individual course licenses to your cart from the OpenSesame course pages.  Purchase within OpenSesame using a credit card or fill out our form to sign up to be invoiced

Syncing courses

Once courses have been purchased, you can start building your sync cart to push courses to appear into your LMS.

If you just made a standard license purchase or a site license purchase, the course or course bundle will be automatically added to your sync cart after you complete your purchase.

If you’ve purchased OpenSesame Plus, we highly recommend only syncing the courses from Plus that you expect to assign to your users through the following process:

1. Navigate to OpenSesame search results.

2. Filter search results to OpenSesame Plus content, if it isn’t already filtered for you.

3. Browse and develop your training plan.

4. Add courses to your Sync Cart after you’ve finalized your list by clicking the “Add to Sync Cart” button on each course page.

Get in touch!

Have any questions or comments about LMS integrations or want to learn more? Contact us at support@opensesame.com or call 503.808.1268.

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If you purchased a course online with OpenSesame, you can start viewing your course immediately afterward. You can also return to the website to watch the course at a later date or pause halfway through to resume later. Let’s walk through how easy it is to access your course again after you have purchased it.

First, make sure you are logged into your OpenSesame account. After logging in, you will see “Hello ‘Your Name’” in the top right-hand corner of the window (see below). Using the drop-down menu that appears by hovering over your name, navigate to the ‘My Courses’ dashboard to find courses you have purchased.

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