Portland, OR – 28 June 2019 – OpenSesame, the elearning innovator, announced the addition of Mind Channel to its popular OpenSesame Plus subscription to expand its offering of multilingual and microlearning courses. As microlearning has gained in popularity due to its easy consumption by learners, enterprise companies also need to offer this training in the multiple languages spoken by its global workforce. 

The OpenSesame Plus subscription, with over 6,000 curated courses—now including Mind Channel content—is the go-to solution for hundreds of Global 2000 companies to help develop and retain global talent, streamline training processes, and future-proof their organization.

With the goal of increasing learner engagement, Mind Channel creates short, fun, and accessible training to grow and develop global employees quickly and efficiently. Their microlearning courses are fully localized in English, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese.

“In today’s fast-paced business environment, learners often don’t have time to sit through traditional long-format training nor do L&D professionals have time to search for high-quality content in multiple languages,” said Spencer Thornton, Vice President of Curation at OpenSesame. “Adding Mind Channel to our OpenSesame Plus subscription ensures global organizations have modern training that meets the needs of their diverse workforce.”

“OpenSesame’s unrivaled reach and reputation in the online learning industry will be a great way for us to expand our audience,” says Claudia Mcfarlane, Director of Mind Channel. “We are excited to partner with OpenSesame to provide short, engaging, and to-the-point microlearning designed for global enterprises.”

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 Mind Channel

Mind Channel provides new and innovative microlearning content for the modern employee, creating short bite-sized modules using high-quality character based animation. The content is fun and informative and subjects covered include personal development, leadership, sales, project management, and beyond. To learn more, visit www.mind-channel.com

Media contact:

Diane Haines

Vice President of Marketing

(503) 808-1268

diane.haines@opensesame.com

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The rise of micro-learning

How does corporate learning have to change to meet today’s time challenged employees? One way is by utilizing micro-learning – short bursts of learning, three to five minutes long, doing away with long-winded explanations and focusing on key practical tips. Today’s learner is well used to gaining knowledge this way. Think about this scenario: if the wheel on your bike was broken, what would you do? Enroll yourself in a bike repair course at your local college? Unlikely. Drive to the library and rent a book on bike repair? Maybe…15 years ago. You’d probably more likely go to YouTube and look at a two-minute video of someone showing you how to fix the problem.

How do you implement micro-learning in your organization?

Micro-learning comes in all shapes and sizes, from animated videos to flash cards. If you want to implement micro-learning in your organization, you can create your own micro-learning, either from scratch using an authoring tool like Articulate Storyline or Vyond, or by cutting down longer modules and videos into shorter parts. If you are cutting down learning, here’re some tips:

• • Make sure that you’re “trimming the fat”. There’s not much benefit in splitting an hour-long elearning into six 10-minute modules.
  • Find the top three key points of the longer piece of learning; what are the three things you’d want the learner to walk away knowing even if they don’t remember anything else? Make each of these points the focus of an individual piece of micro-learning.
  • If there’s a process or series of steps include a take-away performance support resource as part of your micro-learning package – this could be a one-page PDF or PNG with key steps. The learner can then print or save this to their phone’s camera roll for reference later.

Off-the-shelf gives you both a deployment and coverage advantage

You could also consider purchasing relevant micro-learning off-the-shelf instead. OpenSesame has many micro-learning courses created by micro-learning companies that specialize in creating these types of courses, like the course publisher Mind Channel who covers popular topics such as Time Management Tips or Qualities of Great Leaders. Purchasing courses off the shelf often speeds up deployment and gives you huge topic coverage; important if you are planning on a company-wide rollout of microlearning.

And don’t forget you can use micro-learning both standalone and by incorporating it into larger blended learning offers. You could use a short micro-learning video at the start of a face to face classroom session or print performance support posters for the office. And there you have it – micro-learning explained in under four and a half minutes!

About the author: Claudia McFarlane is a Director at Mind Channel with over 15 years’ experience in digital learning, scrum master and agile learning design. Her experience spans from both consultant and management roles within learning and development for public and private sectors.

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Agile learning design

So what’s the alternative? Agile learning design refers to any approach to content development that focuses on speed, flexibility and collaboration. The term evolved from the software development industry and is now one of the fastest growing trends in learning and development.

It’s increasingly being adopted by Learning and Development teams due to its adaptable nature, which allows the development process to respond flexibly to changing client needs. Typically work in an agile project is split into mini projects called “sprints”. In these sprints you create prototypes (quickly designed versions of the final product) which you then test with clients and end users and iterate until it is ready for release. You can learn more about what is a sprint and how to get started in Mind Channel’s course, What is a sprint? available through OpenSesame.

The difference

Let’s take the example of developing a ten-module learning course. Using the ADDIE model you would scope and design all 10 modules of the course at once, and then move into developing all ten modules together. Only once they are all fully developed – which let’s say take 6 months – will the end users and clients get a chance to have a hands-on test. It’s not uncommon that even though they have approved scripts, it’s only after having a proper hands-on test that the client discovers something significant that needs to be changed. So not only do you need to wait 6 months before releasing anything, any changes requested at the end of process will be costly both in time and budget terms. By using the agile methodology you could split the project into ten 3-week sprints, each focusing on an individual module. In these sprints you would scope and build a prototype and then test it with the end users and gather feedback for changes. You’d then make these changes and produce a Minimum Viable Product – a ready to release version of the module which meets the key user needs. This allows you to release the first module after 3 weeks and mitigates the risk of late changes from the client.

This is just the beginning

There’s much more detail to go into including the different team roles and documents, but for now in true minimum viable product style, we’ll end the blog here! For more information about how to get started with Agile learning, check out Introduction to Agile Project Management by OpenSesame course publisher Mind Channel or contact OpenSesame at info@opensesame.com

About the author: Claudia McFarlane is a Director at Mind Channel with over 15 years’ experience in digital learning, scrum master and agile learning design. Using design thinking to help organizations and L&D teams to embed and sustain behavior change to create the workforce of the future. Her experience spans from both consultant and management roles within learning and development for public and private sectors organizations.

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