Note: If your learners will be retaking the exact same courses year-over-year, such as for certification or compliance needs, please contact our Support team to update a setting on those courses.

Unlike our subscription or Volume course licenses, Pay Per Use (PPU) licenses do not have a shared start date, and they are generally used by customers who make an upfront deposit. As learners launch courses, their individual seat licenses begin.

At first launch, the cost of the learner’s seat is added to a running tally. At the end of a monthly billing cycle, all PPU costs are either deducted from a deposit or charged to a credit card on file.

OpenSesame accounts must be specially contracted and configured for Pay Per Use, and PPU licenses do not offer discounts. If your account is not set up for PPU and you wish to explore this license type further, please contact our team.

Courses from the TED@Work bundle are not available for PPU licenses.

License durations
License renewals
How to add courses to the PPU Library
How to increase the number of seats
Using PPU licenses with other license types

License durations

For customers using a Learning Management System (LMS), individual Pay Per Use seats last for 12 months from a learner’s first launch. Learners may relaunch or retake a course as often as they wish throughout the length of their license.

There is a safeguard to prevent charges for brief, accidental launches: PPU courses will not tally a charge until a learner has a course open for two minutes or launches it twice.

License renewals

After a learner’s original seat expires, attempts to relaunch their course will normally display an error. This error prevents unexpected additional charges. If you would prefer to allow learners to activate another seat after their original license expires, please contact OpenSesame Support.

If you have directed OpenSesame Support to allow year-over-year retakes for a PPU course, and the LMS is configured to allow learners to retake the course after their original seat expires, then learners may continue to access the content. In that case, when they relaunch a course after their initial 12-month license expires, they will activate—and incur a charge for—a fresh 12-month seat.

When learners activate a new seat, depending on how your OpenSesame courses and LMS are configured, they will either resume their courses where they’d left off or any progress will reset and they will start from the beginning.

How to add courses to the PPU Library

If you use a Learning Management System with an embedded-catalog integration, please add courses to your PPU library while accessing OpenSesame through the LMS.

If your account is configured for PPU, you will see an “Add to Library” button appear on any given course page:

Note: If you do not see a button and are using a tablet, mobile device, or narrow browser window, please scroll to the bottom of the page. If it does not appear there either, contact us for assistance.

If the button reads “Deliver Course,” you already have a license.

This will navigate to the course’s purchasing page. Click the “Add to Library” button underneath the Pay Per Use option to add the course to your PPU library:

A success message will appear at top right, and the course will now appear in your PPU dashboard:

You can also use Lists to create PPU licenses for multiple courses at once. While viewing a List, select courses to reveal the “Add to Library” button:

Note: If you have one license type per course, Lists can be used to download or send course files for use in an LMS. If you have multiple licenses for certain courses, their files must be downloaded or sent from the individual course pages.

Clicking this button will lead to a brief loading screen as the request processes. A success message should then appear:

Click the “Dashboard” button in that message to navigate straight to the PPU Dashboard. This dashboard can also be reached by selecting “Dashboard” from the account menu and then clicking the “Pay Per Use (PPU)” tab:

Once you add a PPU course to your Learning Management System and make the training available to learners, the “Seats Used” column will update as seats are occupied. LMS learners occupy a seat upon first launch, when their 12-month license begins.

Please note that any test launch will occupy and charge for a PPU seat, as initial launches will assign a unique seat license. (There is a safeguard to prevent charges for brief, accidental launches: PPU courses will not tally a charge until a learner has a course open for two minutes or launches it twice.)

How to increase the number of seats

Unlike our other license types, PPU seats are not purchased in advance. In an LMS, a new PPU seat is activated when a learner launches their PPU course for the first time. As a result, the path for adding seats depends on how your Learning Management System allows learners to access training.

• If your LMS allows learners to discover and launch PPU courses on their own, additional seats will be generated on demand—no further action is necessary once the course is in the LMS.
• If your LMS does not allow learners to locate and launch PPU courses on their own, it may be necessary to use the LMS’s tools to assign courses directly.

If your learners can discover and launch courses on their own and you decide to prevent new launches of a PPU course, the simplest solution is to deactivate it from within the LMS. If deactivation is not an option, you can click the course’s “Pause License” button in the OpenSesame PPU Dashboard. Any learners who had already launched the course would continue to have access for the duration of their 12-month seat, and new learners would see an error upon launch. (For more details on unpausing a paused PPU license, please see this article.)

Using PPU licenses with other license types

On occasion, a combination of license types may be the best solution for your training needs. (For more details on our subscription and Volume licenses, please see this article.)

Note: Each license type will have its own dedicated course file for your LMS. When using multiple license types for the exact same course, we strongly recommend labeling or renaming each file within the LMS to more easily tell them apart.

If you don’t yet have any licenses for a course and you plan to use PPU, be sure to add the course to the PPU library before purchasing other license types.

If you have a course in your PPU library and no other license types for it, you can quickly add up to 100 OpenSesame Plus seats, up to 1000 Volume Purchase seats, or both if they are purchased at the same time. (For larger training needs, please contact your OpenSesame Customer Success Manager or our team.)

To add a new license type for a course that’s in your PPU library, first log in to your OpenSesame account. If you use an LMS with an embedded-catalog integration, access your OpenSesame account through the LMS. Once logged in, navigate to the course page you’re interested in, click the “Buy More Seats” link that appears next to the “Deliver Course” button, and then follow the desired license type’s purchasing steps as outlined in this article.

If you already have an OpenSesame Plus or a Volume license for a course and have decided to add a PPU license as well, please contact us and we’ll be happy to assist.

If you have further questions, our Support team is here to help via email at support@opensesame.com or via live chat and phone. Feel free to reach us at (503) 808-1268, ext. 2, or at +44 203 744 5541 in Europe.