OpenSesame Inc. is a

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

based educational technology company that provides an online marketplace for buying and selling

SCORM Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based electronic educational technology (also called e-learning). It defines communications between client side content and a host system (ca ...

elearning courses focused primarily on employee training. Its online training platform, directly connects content providers with employees and businesses for online training resources and specially designed courses for professionals, which can be accessed through a

Learning management system A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, materials or learning and development programs. The lear ...

. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

. As of January 2024, OpenSesame tracks around 30,000 courses from more than 200 publishers.

History

The idea to start OpenSesame came to the founders Don Spear, Joshua Blank, Aaron Bridges and Tom Turnbull in 2011. They founded the company on the idea to aggregate fragmented elearning content from reputable publishers and resources including FranklinCovey, Cegos and Wiley through a Learning Management System (LMS). They worked on creating an ecommerce platform where any seller can add courses for sale and any buyer can purchase courses for use in their company's learning and development program. They went through the

Portland State University Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the following two decad ...

Business Accelerator and after conducting a few pilot trials, OpenSesame received seed funding of $2 million from Harmony Investments in October 2011. The company soon gained some major clients including satellite TV giant Dish Network, SilkRoad Technology, Five Guys Burgers and

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. In January 2014 the company raised another round of Series A funding of $10 million led by Partech Ventures to create a corporate content delivery platform modeled after iTunes. The marketplace allows the seller to set the price of the content, with a share in the profits for distributing through OpenSesame's marketplace. On July 22, 2014, OpenSesame was granted US Patent Number US 8784113 B2 for their “Open and Interactive e-Learning System and Method.”

Development

Since 2011, the OpenSesame development team has been focusing on the content and the development of features in line with the businesses' needs. The main concern of the company is not to build up a large number of new features on its marketplace, but to concentrate upon a few elaborated tools that can integrate with the various LMS’.

Use

OpenSesame is used in continuing professional development for employees and professionals via courses obtained online. Its platform allows companies to buy courses created by industry experts instead of having to create their own. It allows businesses to search for courses offered by its sellers, they can preview the content, read reviews and know about the content seller.

Accessibility

OpenSesame is the first marketplace to comply completely with the accessibility specifications of

Sharable Content Object Reference Model Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based electronic educational technology (also called e-learning). It defines communications between client side content and a host system (cal ...

. The content is also designed for adaptability to any of several teaching and learning scenarios with a variety of authoring tools compatible to any learning management system and custom business tools.

References

External links

* {{official website, https://www.opensesame.com/ Educational technology companies of the United States 2011 establishments in Oregon Companies based in Portland, Oregon Technology companies established in 2011