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 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 at top left:

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

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

Entering any text will update the suggestions. General topics appear at the top, Curated Lists at center, and specific courses at the bottom. In the below example, “management” is used:

Note: For search terms with many suggestions, scroll down to see them all.

Any of these items are clickable. In this case, hitting the Enter key reaches this initial page of 7,837 results for "management":

Viewing your results

The default view shows an illustrated card for each course, arranged in a grid:

A card will include a PLUS banner in the top left corner if the course is included in the OpenSesame Plus subscription catalog. The course's image was selected by the publisher to represent its tone and style. Below the image, the course's title and its publisher’s name appear, as does its rating. Finally, the globe icon represents how many languages a course is fully translated into, and the clock icon represents how much time the publisher estimates that learners will need to complete it.

If you’d prefer a more condensed display for your results, use the icon in the upper right corner to switch to a list view:

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

If you keep the default sort order, you will see three recommendation sections appear at the top of your 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 you will find all other relevant results.

Another feature of the results page is the Load More button at bottom:

Even when a search has thousands of results, you don’t need to wait for them all to load, as only the top twenty-five automatically appear. To continue browsing, scroll to the bottom of the initial batch and click the button to reveal more:

Our search filters offer the fastest way to narrow things down from here.

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 arrows 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 first two categories for “management” are “Business Skills” and “Certifications,” 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. See below for more details on how this filter operates.
• 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, such as from the Project Management Institute (PMI). 

Most of these filters assume an “and” when multiple are selected—such as, “I want Category X and Publisher Y and Course Feature Z”—and limit results to courses that match all requirements.

The Languages filter behaves differently, since the type and depth of translations vary. Rather than eliminating near (but imperfect) matches, this filter finds courses that offer the greatest number of selected languages, even when they do not offer all of them.

We track three types of translation—complete, subtitle, and audio—and all types are accepted by default. To define the standard required for your audience, use these additional filters:

• To search only for courses that are fully translated into your target language(s), uncheck both additional filters.
• To include courses that offer subtitles in your target language(s) but may not be fully translated, check the Subtitles Translated box.
• To include courses that offer audio in your target language(s) but may not be fully translated, check the Audio Translated box.

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 you see an arrow to the right of a language, expand it to see your options.

Putting it all together

Returning to our thousands of results for “management,” 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 7,837 down to 54, and here’s how that looks once scrolled past the recommendation sections:

Each of the chosen filters appears at top left:

Clicking “More” reveals the English tag:

Click the “X” on any of these filter tags to remove it and immediately update your results. In this case, removing the seat-time filter increases the results to 117 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, or at +44 203 744 5541 in Europe.