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PRESENTED BY:

http://www.opensesame.com

Welcome …………………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Why Buyers Choose OpenSesame ……………………………………………… 3

Partnering with OpenSesame……………………………………………………… 6

IT Infrastructure & Security …………………………………………………………. 8

Becoming An OpenSesame Seller ………………………………………………. 10

Uploading Courses ……………………………………………………………………….12

Get Your Courses Noticed …………………………………………………………….14

Viewing Your Data .……………………………………………………………………….17

Closing & Contact Information ……………………………………………………..18

Table of Contents


OpenSesame solves the content conundrum for both buyers and sellers. It's that simple.

Thank you for your interest in being a part of the OpenSesame online marketplace.

Founded in 2010 in Portland, Oregon, OpenSesame is the world’s largest marketplace for buying and selling elearning courses. We have a wide variety of corporate and individual buyers, and we would like to work with you to sell your courses to our buyers. We would like to help you gain access to new, profitable customer channels in the global marketplace.

When you sell your content on OpenSesame, you are given the opportunity to partner with some of the brightest minds in the elearning industry and distribute your content worldwide. As OpenSesame continues to flourish, we need to keep up with the requests of our buyers, and that’s how our sellers become our most valued players.

● Easily manage the courses you sell through your easy-to-love dashboard.● Use any course creation tool that works for you. We don’t discriminate.● Use your browser to access our marketplace in the cloud. We’re fast, flexible &

powerful.● Our patent-pending technology ensures that your content and information is secure.● Sell your elearning courses in the marketplace or add courses to your LMS in minutes

with our super simple process.

OpenSesame has a proven business model, a successful founding team and a large, growing market: US companies alone spent more than $132B on training and development in 2011. OpenSesame has built a large catalog of elearning courses, closed sales with Fortune 500 corporations and developed innovative models for selling and managing online learning content.

We are very excited at the chance to add your course to our ever-growing and expanding marketplace. Throughout the onboarding process, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of our Content Team if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you again for your interest and consideration of OpenSesame!


Our Value Proposition

OpenSesame is currently working with hundreds of buyers of elearning courses and this is growing everyday. Our buyers range from Fortune 500 companies to a 10-person small business. They are Chief Learning Officers, Training & Development Directors, or Human Resource Managers, anyone who could be in charge of creating a training program for a complex community of employees. Customers of OpenSesame come to us for all sorts of reasons and every buyer may have a different reason why they buy from us. It could be due to the fact they’re tired of commissioning and updating the same courses year after year, listening to sales pitches and reviewing complicated contracts, only to hear the same reviews from your employees, or they may be completely new to elearning all together.

Right now the elearning industry is highly fragmented and it can be difficult for buyers to find the right courses for their needs on one website or from one provider. OpenSesame offers several benefits to buyers of online e-learning content that other resellers cannot.

What Makes Us DifferentFast & Flexible

We put all the content/info all in one spot, which makes it easier for the buyer to find the content they need. Buyers can browse the OpenSesame library by subject, length, and difficulty of course, features, cost or popularity. They are able to describe what they need precisely, and find precise results. That’s a lot easier than calling ten different companies, right?

Comprehensive & Friendly

Because all of our courses are on one site we can offer a side by side comparison of courses for the buyer so they can decide which course is right for them based on their objectives and needs (size of class/price of class/etc.). The marketplace also allows the buyer to shop without the sales harassment. They are able to browse courses, preview, ask questions anonymously and decide on a purchase(s) without fear of hundreds of salespeople filling up their voicemail. Buyers greatly appreciate this low-pressure tactic and therefore continue to purchase from us.

Why Buyers Choose OpenSesame


Buying on OpenSesame

We make it very easy for buyers to buy our courses. They can purchase course one of two ways:

eCommerce: The buyer is able to shop the elearning marketplace and purchase licenses for only the courses they need. From there they can buy all the seats they need as well as take advantage of volume discounts. With our simple ecommerce marketplace, OpenSesame makes purchasing elearning courses as simple and familiar as shopping on Amazon.com.

Pay-Per-Use: The buyer can share their training objectives and the OpenSesame content team will create a curriculum of training courses to meet their goals. They can then load course licenses into their LMS and connect their learners with a wide array of training content. The buyer is only billed for the courses they use. Buyers use OpenSesame’s Pay-Per-Use pricing to access offer training without an expensive, long-term contract.

If there is a question between two courses that might work, they are able to start by making a small introductory purchase (i.e. 5 seats) of each course and ask their employees to provide feedback on their effectiveness. They are then able to make an informed decision about their long term training plan without spending too much time or money. Shopping in our marketplace is like dating with no strings attached. Buyers can quickly find the content they need and make only the commitment they are comfortable with.

There are three ways a buyer can use courses from OpenSesame:

1. Online: No LMS? No problem. Buyers can open and view purchased courses on the OpenSesame website.

2. CourseCloud™: Buyers are able to invite their employees to take purchased courses with a quick email. From there they can track their progress and manage invitations in their OpenSesame dashboard.

3. In a learning management system (LMS): OpenSesame has developed patent-pending technology that ensures that content will work in any LMS.

All the courses that are purchased from OpenSesame use our standard license, which gives learners 12 months to start a course, and—once they’ve opened it —12 months to finish. The license will run independently for each learner, giving the buyer the flexibility to use licenses when they need them.

Deploying Courses


https://www.opensesame.com/blog/opensesame-email-delivery-puts-learning-your-inbox

Licenses

The OpenSesame standard license is a simple solution. When a buyer purchases a course on OpenSesame, learners have up to 12 months to start a course. Once a learner starts the course, they have up to 12 months to finish it.

For example, if you purchase two seats of a course on July 10, 2012 for your employees Marco and Jane, they must start their courses within 12 months—on or before July 9, 2013.

If Marco starts his training on August 1, he can access the course until July 31, 2013.

However, if Jane doesn’t start the course until December 30, 2012, she can still access the course for 12 months - until December 29, 2013.

How can OpenSesame’s standard license make elearning more convenient for an organization? Our standard license creates flexibility for organizations whose learners may not all need to use courses at the same time. Connect learners to training resources as needed—rather than based on a formal calendar. Use remaining budget for the current fiscal year while using the licenses on their own schedule.

In other words, buyers can buy courses in one budget cycle and deliver the courses during future cycles.


Intellectual Property Protection

The OpenSesame solution enables content to be played directly on the site by both end-users or the ability to download the “sesame seeds” in order to be deployed on a 3rd party LMS so long as the LMS has the ability to deploy SCORM-compliant courses. In either case, the course content never leaves the OpenSesame servers, thus protecting your intellectual property and metering access to your courses.

If a bulk purchase is made by a user to be deployed on a third-party LMS, OpenSesame will only allow the number of seats sold to be launched. Once the customer meets the number of seats purchased, they will no longer be able to launch that course unless they purchase additional licenses of the course.

Version ControlThe OpenSesame marketplace features built-in version control. If an update is needed on a particular course you will have the ability to update the course via OpenSesame and all individuals who have purchased that content will have the option to use the latest version of the course or the version they previously started.

Course Ratings & ReviewsOpenSesame also allows courses to be rated and reviewed by end users and customers. The reviews are based on a 5 star scale and users can write text reviews that can be edited or removed by a site administrator as necessary. OpenSesame also has the ability to add expert reviews as well. If you have a well-respected industry advisor who would be willing to write course reviews, those can also be reflected at the individual course level.

Administrative CapabilityOpenSesame provides all of our sellers with basic administrative functionality, a seller dashboard, on the site including the ability to upload courses via the user interface, view standard reports and update course descriptions and seller profile information. OpenSesame displays real-time course sales information to sellers in your seller dashboard. For more information on seller dashboards, please see Your Seller Dashboard.

Partnering With OpenSesameOpenSesame offers several advantages and benefits to our sellers. Here are some of our features that differentiate us from other resellers and competitors.


SEO-Friendly SiteOpenSesame has designed the site so you can deep link to any page on the site making it search engine friendly. We also employ a full-time team of SEO experts who develop content and manage pay-per-click and social campaigns to drive traffic to the site.

eCommerce EnabledThe OpenSesame site has a robust and secure eCommerce functionality including the ability to add courses to a cart, check out and pay with a credit card (OpenSesame accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express).

License ManagementOpenSesame only allows the number of user licenses sold to be launched. In other words, if we sell 100 user licenses of a course, a buyer will only be able to assign the course to 100 users in their learning management system (or on OpenSesame’s site). This metering system ensures buyers are paying for the content they use.

Course Volume Discounts

In the regular event a user is buying multiple seats (i.e. bulk), all OpenSesame sellers will have the ability to set volume discount schedules. This can be done at the individual course level. If you would like to set one price for one course and a different price for another, you can easily do so on OpenSesame.

Affiliate ProgramOpenSesame also offers an affiliate program, whereby sellers can simply refer content business to OpenSesame (if, for example, you don’t have content a customer is seeking). If we are able to meet their needs and sell a course, the referring seller would receive a percentage of the sale.

Course Preview VideosWith the OpenSesame platform, sellers are able to designate if a course is available for preview and, if so, the duration of the preview. All of these options are available at the individual course level.


IT Infrastructure & Security

● e-Commerce catalog○ Ubuntu / Drupal7 / Apache Solr / NGINX / MySql○ Amazon EC2

● Licensing System○ Microsoft .Net / MySql○ Amazon EC2

● Content Player○ Rustici Scorm Engine / Microsoft .Net / MySql○ Supports SCORM 1.2 - 2004 v3, AICC, Video○ Amazon EC2

● Database Backend○ MySql○ Amazon RDS (Multi-Availability Zone redundancy mode)

● CDN○ Global content delivery and application acceleration platform


● Content is delivered via CDN to authorized users only, using single use URL’s which are only accessible to the user’s IP address for a limited amount of time.

● Content delivered via LMS is delivered to LMS by proxy. Customers never receive the original course files.

Content Delivery & Security

Application Security

● PCI compliant

● No credit card numbers stored

● Amazon Security API provides perimeter security

● All servers patched at least monthly with security updates

● All servers have local firewall and virus scan enabled

● In the event of major failure at Amazon, all server images can be automatically recreated in an alternate Amazon datacenter or alternate hosting provider using Puppet IT automation toolset

● Database and web servers operate in clustered/load balanced mode

● Continuous onsite backup to Amazon S3

● Continuous offsite backup of all data and content assets to OpenSesame office

Continuation of Business / Disaster Recovery


Becoming An OpenSesame Seller

Create Your Profile in Just Five Easy Steps

We have a simpler is better attitude at OpenSesame which is the basis for our business model and publisher agreement. OpenSesame operates on a simple revenue share business model. We only make money when we sell content. For that, we operate under a 60/40 split. 60% of everything we sell goes back to you as the seller. OpenSesame uses 40% to subsidize the costs of our sales and marketing efforts. We never charge any additional fees, including but not limited to:

● Initial Start Up Fee● Bandwidth Fee● Fees for Services Rendered (marketing, IT, ongoing account management)

It is that simple. We are not successful unless YOU are successful. We are laser focused on selling courses and constantly driving traffic to our marketplace.

Step 1: Create An AccountThis can be easily done via the OpenSesame website. Simply go to www.opensesame.com and click on “Sign Up” in the upper right hand corner of the site and complete all of the necessary information to create an account. As we mentioned earlier in this guide, your profile is more than just a quick stop on your way to selling training courses—it’s your opportunity to help customers find your courses and to feel confident about them.

Step 2: Add An Image

Whether it’s reading a blog, skimming through news articles or scrolling through search results, peoples’ eyes are captured by interesting images. Your profile image appears next to your courses in OpenSesame search results, so that means having a professional, attractive and interesting logo is an essential opportunity to make your courses stand out from the crowd.

Step 3: Complete Your ProfileUpdate your Display Name to accurately reflect your company name. Ensure that your seller bio has a good description of your company and its focus and services.

This profile needs to capture visitors’ attention and tempt them to click on the links to courses you have added to the OpenSesame marketplace—so be persuasive and thorough.


Create Your Profile in Just Five Easy Steps (cont.)

Step 4: OptimizeAs mentioned before you should use keywords relevant to the topics to your courses to make it easy for customers using search engines to find your profile. If you’re using OpenSesame as your e-commerce platform, add links on your website that use appropriate keywords, like “Buy my elearning courses on OpenSesame” or “Find Example Company’s Business Skills Curriculum on OpenSesame”.

Step 5: Utilize Social MediaCustomers are increasingly turning to social media to learn more about the companies they do business with- and connecting with your customers on social media is a great way to keep your company and its products front-of-mind. So add those links to your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles!

Yes, this means spell-check matters. Make sure your company’s seller profile is free from grammatical errors, jokes and out-of-date information. Our user research shows that customers click on links to seller profiles to make sure that the course they’re considering buying comes from a reputable, professional company- so make sure your profile is an extension of your company’s public image.

Once you have created your user profile you will be able to use this profile and our seller dashboard to manage your account on OpenSesame.

Be sure to check it twice!


Uploading CoursesHere are step-by-step instructions on how to upload courses through our interface.

If you have a large number of courses or large video video files, please contact a Content Specialist to help set up a bulk upload.

Go to the Add a Course page (below) where you can select a course file and enter all of the information about your course, including title, description, features and price. OpenSesame supports SCORM, AICC and video files, with one file for each course.

Upload Courses


Before we publish your course to the OpenSesame website, we make sure that your course will both play across the common browsers and operating systems that our customers use and send a “complete” status to the learning management system.

Once you’ve uploaded a course, we’ll need you to validate the course in at least one browser. In order to validate the course, after you’ve uploaded the course, click “validate course”. Your course will pop up in a new tab, where you can launch it to fulfill the completion criteria necessary for the course to send a complete status to the learning management system. If your course is a video, validation isn’t necessary.

Once a course has been successfully uploaded, tested and validated, you will be prompted to submit the course for approval. When you submit the course, it is automatically added to our moderation queue, where we perform a second technical test as well as a quality check for every course. We complete these tests within 3-5 business days, and you’ll be notified when the course is published or if we have any additional questions.

Validating Courses

Bundles

In addition to selling each of your courses individually on OpenSesame, you can also create bundles of courses to make it easier for customers to purchase a curriculum or collection. To create a bundle, simply contact a member of the Content Team with the title of the bundle, included courses, description, duration, categorization and pricing for each bundle you wish to create.

If you add, update or remove courses from your library, you’ll want to make sure that you do the same on the OpenSesame site. For adding new courses, sellers can simply follow the same steps as outlined above for Adding Your Courses.

For course updates or to remove a course, you’ll need to login to your seller account and then click “Manage Your Courses”. There you’ll see a link next to each course to “Update Course”. From there you can make any changes to an existing course (i.e. pricing, discount structure, new file) or if necessary, you can remove the course from the catalog.

Updating Courses


Get Your Courses NoticedYour success is our success. We use a variety of sales and marketing initiatives to promote content for sale in the marketplace.

● Our direct sales and business development staff work directly with customers to assess their learning and development needs and find solutions in our marketplace.

● We have extensive search engine optimization and pay-per-click search engine

marketing campaigns in place. ● We conduct social media outreach through our blog and social networks like

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora. ● We are developing channel partnerships with learning management system

vendors based on API integrations.

We also run a variety of targeted marketing campaigns, and we are happy to develop creative marketing with our sellers in order to drive traffic and generate sales of your content. Options include:

● Guest Blog posts—These can be written by OpenSesame staff or the seller themselves

● Courses of the Week—Our weekly newsletter highlighting specific courses

● Search engine optimization (SEO)o Try this course on SEO Tips to Increase Sales

● Featured sellers

In addition to the marketing and sales efforts by OpenSesame staff there are several things you as the seller can do to improve your search results

within the marketplace.

Check out the next section for tips on marketing your elearning courses in order to maximize sales opportunities.


https://direct.opensesame.com/c/seo-tips-increase-sales-training-course

Upload your logo, add your company description, and provide links to your website and social media profiles. Make your profile a juicy and informative place to learn more about your products. We strongly encourage sellers to offer a preview of their course through OpenSesame so consumers have the opportunity to self-serve and learn more about your courses.

It doesn’t matter how great your course is if people never click on the preview button to find out. Write your course description well, without typos and with details. Describe everything clearly; The topic of the course, the course interactivity, learning objectives, featured experts, prerequisites, certifications, etc. Proofread your description carefully to ensure you position your course as professionally as possible. Here are some more in-depth tips to assist you in writing your course descriptions:

● Add an interesting selection of images. Upload several beautiful screenshots of your course to capture buyer’s interest. Allow customers to preview your courses, so they can sample your course and get a feel for the content.

● Be detailed but not long-winded. Buyers usually have specific questions: What features does this course include? What topics does it cover? Who is the intended audience? Use all of the different components of the OpenSesame course page to answer buyers’ questions before they ask. No need to write a novel, through! All of the text on your course description page should be around 300 words.

● Do keyword research. Keywords in your course descriptions attract traffic from search engines. Use the Google Adwords Tool to find suggested keywords related to the topics of your courses.

Write a Great Course Description

Complete Your Profile

OpenSesame offers easy-to-use course reviewing features to enable our customers to easily find the best courses. To make your courses more appealing, ask your existing customers to write reviews of courses in the OpenSesame marketplace. This improves search engine optimization and also provides more information to buyers about your courses.

Recruit Reviews


Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Whether a buyer uses Google to search for eLearning courses or uses the OpenSesame search engine to sort through the OpenSesame catalog, most users rely on search engines to make sense of the thousands of elearning courses available. The keywords you use to describe your courses are of the utmost importance in marketing your products.

Start by using the Google Adwords Tool to research what keywords related to your courses topic have the heaviest search volume. Use those keywords in your course title and description often. Carefully select the appropriate topics in the OpenSesame library architecture. While it may be tempting to select tons of course subjects, selecting irrelevant topics will actually hurt you in the long run, as it dilutes the focus on the targeted keywords for search engine filters.

Google and other search engines will penalize content that is repeated across multiple websites, so don’t just cut and paste the same course description on every site where you market your courses. Write a unique description of your course and your company for OpenSesame to ensure that Google’s bots recognizes the value of your content. User reviews will add additional unique content to each course page, enhancing it search engine position further.

Get our there! Participate in online discussions on blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. Be a genuine and authentic voice of authority in your field and attract more attention to your website and products as a result.

Your presence in existing online conversations will drive further traffic to your website and course pages.

Toot Your Own Horn!


Viewing Your DataAs a seller in our elearning marketplace, no doubt you want to know how your courses are selling. OpenSesame’s dashboard provides real-time sales data to help you understand what’s selling, when.

Start by logging into OpenSesame and clicking “My Account” in the top of the navigation bar. This is your seller dashboard, where you can view your account balance, next payment amount and next payment date. This is the big picture of your sales and revenue earned on OpenSesame.

To dive into the details of which courses are earning the most revenue, click “Manage Your Courses” for more information. You can click on each individual course title to see the course control panel, which displays sales data for each course. The control panel displays the sales data for each course.

The control panel displays the all-time number of transactions, with a breakdown in site licenses and seats sold. Finally, the control panel displays the cumulative revenue you’ve earned from that course. You may also update the course from this screen or remove the course from your catalog.

After a sale of your content, OpenSesame will transfer your funds to you 30 days after the end of the month in which your sale occurred. OpenSesame transfers funds to sellers on the first of every month via check or PayPal (PayPal is primarily for International sellers). As a result, the next payment amount reflects the payment that will occur at the beginning of the next month and may be smaller than the full balance of funds owed to you. The account balance may reflect funds owed for up to three months of sales: the present month and the two months prior.


Through our ground-breaking ecommerce marketplace, active sales team and extensive web marketing efforts, OpenSesame can help you add top line revenue by bringing you opportunities you might not uncover on your own. We are eager to work with you and we are confident that we will have a long-term mutually beneficial partnership.

OpenSesame simplifies selling and ensures your courses are protected. We’re thrilled to partner with you! Remember, your success is our success. Selling courses is our sole focus and we welcome the opportunity to work with you.

Thank you again for considering OpenSesame!

OpenSesame Content Team

Spencer Thornton, Director of Content

● [email protected]● 503-808-1268 ext 317

Max DuBowy, Content Specialist● [email protected] ● 503-808- 1268 ext 336

Carl Kaplan, Content Specialist● [email protected]● 503-808-1268 ext 333

mailto:[email protected]






presented by - amazon s3...right now the elearning industry is highly fragmented and it can be...

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