When hunting for the right course to suit your learners’ needs, knowing how to narrow down thousands of possibilities can be a significant time-saver. 

In this guide: 

• Begin your search
• Understand your results
• Filter your results
• Example

If you prefer videos, see the following overview:

Begin your search

From your dashboard or the login screen, click the search bar:

Frequent topics will appear: 

These initial suggestions are the most popular searches entered by OpenSesame users. To see the relevant catalog results, select one. Otherwise, enter text in the search bar.

Topics related to your search will appear first, Curated Lists next, and then specific courses. Each suggestion can be clicked:

For full results, submit your text. For example, entering "management" returns thousands of initial results:

Understand your results

The default display has an illustrated card for each course, arranged in a grid:

Each image was selected by the course's publisher to represent its tone and content. A card will have a Plus banner if the course is included in the OpenSesame Plus subscription. 

Following the image are the course's title and publisher name. An icon represents the course's content style: Audio, Book Summary, Interactive, or Virtual Reality. A course may also have a label noting it is New, Updated, or Exclusive to OpenSesame.

A course's feedback rating appears next, when available, and its seat time represents how long its publisher estimates learners will need to complete it. Finally, a globe icon and number represent the available languages.

If you prefer a compact display, switch from the default grid to a list:

Sort By allows you to choose which factor to prioritize. The default is Relevancy, which uses OpenSesame's algorithms to suggest good matches. You can also sort by when a course was added, when it was updated, its rating, its title (from A-Z or Z-A), or its price:

If you use the default sort order and display, up to three recommendation sections will precede your results:

1. Curated Lists
2. Popular courses, according to OpenSesame ratings and usage
3. New and recently updated courses

All other relevant results follow these sections.

The top twenty-five results for your search will automatically load. To continue browsing, scroll to the end and click Load More:

This reveals the next twenty-five courses:

Filter your results

Search filters offer multiple ways to narrow down your results. 

If you prefer videos, see the following walkthrough:

The filter bar is expanded by default:

To collapse the bar, click any filter's arrow to hide that filter:

There are many options for granular searching:

• The OpenSesame Plus toggle, which is on by default, limits results to courses included in the OpenSesame Plus subscription.
• Category offers common umbrellas for a search topic, in alphabetical order. To limit results to one category, select it.
• Product Type allows you to include, exclude, or focus on Curated Lists.
• Publishers limits results to particular course creators. To find courses only available from OpenSesame, turn on the OpenSesame Exclusive toggle.
• Languages allows you to select content languages. More details follow on how this filter operates.
• Accessibility Standards requires results to meet key accessibility benchmarks.
• Competencies limits results to courses relevant to the OpenSesame Primary Competency Model.
• Style allows you to select the content formats your learners prefer, such as interactive (the most common elearning style), book summaries, audio-only, or virtual reality.
• Course Features allows you to require popular content elements.
• Seat Time represents approximately how long learners will need to complete a course, according to the publisher.
• Rating, when available, collects feedback that OpenSesame learners have submitted from within a course. (If you use a learning platform with its own feedback tools, that platform information is not shared with OpenSesame.)
• Price represents the full price for one non-subscription license to a course, when purchased individually. To view it, switch your results from the default grid to a list display.
• Accreditation Organizations identifies courses that offer Continuing Education credit hours, such as from the Project Management Institute (PMI). 

When you use multiple filters, they work together using "and." For example, selecting category X, publisher Y, and course feature Z will show courses that meet all those requirements. The Languages filter works the same.

OpenSesame organizes languages in three ways:

1. Course Text
2. Subtitles
3. Audio

Course Text describes a course’s primary interactive content, such as the user interface.

Note: If the Languages filter is inaccessible, try removing any Publisher filters. It could be that a publisher does support your target languages, but not in the same combination of filters.

• Course Text only: To find courses with primary content that matches your selected language(s), keep the default, where only the Course Text toggle is on. (If you use this filter to search for two or more languages and there are no exact matches, you’ll receive the closest available results.)
• Subtitles only: Turn on the Subtitles Translated toggle and turn off the others.
• Audio only: Turn on the Audio Translated toggle and turn off the others.
• Subtitles and audio: Turn on the Subtitles and Audio toggles, and turn off the Course Text toggle.

Depending on your results, you can also filter within a language. For example, it is possible to avoid British or Australian English if you only want courses with an American accent, or favor Canadian French over European French. If a language has such regional variations available, click its arrow to review them.

Example

In the example search for "management," adding filters for courses that are in English, longer than an hour, accredited by the Project Management Institute (PMI), and with a rating of four stars or higher brings the thousands of results down to 57:

Any active filters precede the filter tools. Up to three appear by default:

To reveal any others, click More:

To remove an active filter and update the results, click the filter's X. For example, removing the seat-time filter increases these results to 153 courses:

If you navigate away from your search results then return, the filters you selected will remain active.

Finally, if you would prefer to use our internal algorithms to generate course suggestions rather than manually search, see How to use Smart Lists.

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 (U.S.) or +44 203 744 5541 (Europe).