Dev Team Highlights from 2014

It seems like just yesterday we were making big plans to launch OpenSesame Plus (our newest subscription based licensing model) and, in the blink of an eye, here we are 12 months later! Before we take a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2015, let’s take a quick look back at some of the OpenSesame Dev Team’s noteworthy items from 2014.

OpenSesame Plus was by far our biggest project of the year. The subscription program, which includes unlimited access to 3,000+ courses for one low price, launched in early 2014 and quickly became our most popular purchasing solution. Throughout the year we’ve added multiple features to make buying, browsing courses, and administering your OpenSesame Plus subscription even easier!

Tin Can statement forwarding and LTI course launches (Learning Tools Interoperability) are now supported. For our customers using LRS (Learning Record Store), OpenSesame can easily convert SCORM and AICC results to Tin Can format for forwarding into any third-party LRS. We also added an LTI course launcher for LMS customers that do not support SCORM or AICC. To read more about this new feature, check out my March blog post, which covered the topic in detail. 

Course preview videos can now be added to any course in the OpenSesame marketplace. This allows sellers to offer a short video, much like a movie trailer or commercial, informing learners about the course.

CSV report downloads for OpenSesame Plus courses were launched shortly after Plus became available. The reports are available from the OpenSesame Plus “Manage” page, or from the course specific “Track Users” pages. They allow for convenient tracking that can be utilized to show user progress and scores.

Our new support site makes it easy to get at helpful information on a wide variety of topics in one place. You can search for relevant topics, browse through FAQs, watch video tutorials, or easily access contact information and social media for our team. You can visit the support page directly or by clicking the “Help” link from our main site.

Our course wrapper got a facelift, as well as some additional functionality this year. The course wrapper now allows learners to easily rate their courses (1-5 stars) while also tracking their course status right in the course launch window. This makes ratings more accessible and intuitive, which allows us to collect and provide more feedback to our sellers on the quality of their courses.

Content discovery and improved search results were major initiatives for the development team. We rebuilt the logic and search index in our marketplace to improve results for visitors, making it easier to find the perfect course to meet your training need. With the broadest, deepest, and freshest catalog in the industry, we want to ensure our site search makes our catalog the simplest and easiest to use.

2015 Sneak Peek
Shhhh! We have big plans for the new year and can’t wait to for everyone to see what we’ve been working on. We are overhauling our marketplace…with a new design, new ways to explore our catalog, a fun “meet the team” feature, and much more! Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for the big reveal. Until then, wishing you happy holidays and a wonderful New Year from the OpenSesame Dev Team!