How to use our course catalog’s search tools

When hunting for the right course to suit your learners’ needs, knowing how to quickly narrow down thousands of possibilities is a serious time-saver. What follows is a guide to our revamped search tools, which will help you hone in on an ideal course.

If you would prefer a video, here is a walkthrough:

Beginning your search

From either your dashboard or the login screen, click the magnifying glass icon in the upper left corner:

The first thing you’ll notice is the “typeahead” feature, a drop-down box which automatically appears once the search bar is clicked: 

Note that the typeahead is not currently available in Internet Explorer.

These initial recommendations are the most popular searches entered by OpenSesame users, and selecting one will bring you to relevant catalog results.

Entering any other text will update the drop-down, which suggests matches based on what you’ve begun to type. General topics appear at the top, Curated Lists at center, and specific courses at the bottom. In the below example, “management” is used:

Any of these items are clickable. In this case, hitting the Enter key to keep with “management” reaches this initial page of 4,192 results:

Viewing your results

The default view shows an illustrated card for each course, arranged in a grid. If you’d prefer a more condensed display, use the icon in the upper right corner to toggle to a list view:

Next to that icon is the first sorting tool, where you can choose the factor to prioritize. The default setting is “Relevancy,” which uses our internal algorithms to suggest good matches. You can also choose to sort by price, rating, the time a course was originally added, or the time it was last updated:

Whichever view you choose, you can click on a course title to see a slide-out profile, which allows you to see more details without leaving your search results:

Simply click the grayed-out area at left to close the slide-out and return to your results.

If you use the default sort order, “Relevancy,” you will see three recommendation panels appear at the top of your search results. The first suggests Curated Lists relevant to your topic. The next suggests popular courses, which takes things like ratings and usage into account, and the third displays new and recently updated courses. Underneath these panels you will find all other relevant results.

Another aspect of the results page is the “Load More” button at the bottom:

If you start out with thousands of results, they won’t all appear at once, which makes page loads faster. Once you scroll to the bottom of an initial batch, the “Load More” button allows you to continue browsing:

Filtering your results

Next, let’s take a look at the options for narrowing down all these results. At left is the filter bar:

When you first load the catalog, these filter categories will start out expanded, so you can see more details on the options available. By using the ^ carats at the far right of each filter, though, you can condense them:

And here’s how it looks if you click on “More Filters” at the bottom:

As you can see, there are a lot of options for granular searching! From the top:

• The “OpenSesame Plus” toggle allows you to limit your results to courses included in our subscription catalog. In these examples, the toggle is off and results are not limited.
• “Category” suggests common umbrellas for the topic you’re looking for-- the top two categories for “management” are “Business Skills” and “Industry Specific,” for example.
• “Product Type” allows you to search for or exclude Curated Lists.
• “Publishers” allows you to narrow the results to one or more course providers you know you like.
• “Languages” allows you to select one or more languages you want the content to be in. If you need a course’s audio to be fully translated, uncheck the “Include subtitles” box. Depending on your results, you could also filter within languages. It is possible to filter out British English if you do not want courses with an accent, or favor Canadian French over European French. If you see a carat ^ to the right of a language, click it to see your options.
• “Course Features” will use “and” logic if you choose more than one. So if you select “Inline Activities” and “Post-Assessment,” for example, you will narrow your results to only the courses that offer both.
• “Seat Time,” “Rating,” and “Price” are familiar factors.
• “Accreditation Organizations” is an especially useful filter if you are looking for courses that offer Continuing Education credit hours. Here are the options that appear for the “management” search:
  

Let's say you decide to filter for courses accredited by the Project Management Institute (PMI), that are in English, that are longer than an hour, and that have a rating of four stars or higher. This brings the results from 4,192 down to 38, and here’s how that looks once scrolled past the recommendation panels:

Each of the chosen filters appears at top left:

Clicking the “More” reveals the PMI tag:

Click the “X” on any of these filter tags to remove it and immediately update your list of courses. In this case, removing the seat-time filter increases the results to 148 potential matches:

Finally, if you would rather use our internal algorithms to generate multiple course suggestions instead of manually searching, try our popular Smart Lists feature.

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.