The Dispatch
Curation as a business model
In 2011, four founders in Portland, Oregon looked at the corporate training industry and saw a familiar mess: excellent content, scattered across hundreds of publishers, impossible to buy in one place. Their answer was not to make more courses. It was to build a storefront.
OpenSesame runs a curated online marketplace for workplace e-learning. It licenses courses from more than 100 publishers - names like FranklinCovey, Cegos and Wiley - and packages them into a single catalog that spans compliance, safety, leadership, business skills, technology, diversity and wellness. Today the company markets tens of thousands of courses, delivered in more than 70 languages.
The pitch in the early days was audacious: make buying a training course as easy as buying a song on iTunes. Fifteen years later, the underlying bet still defines the company. OpenSesame is content-agnostic. It does not primarily produce the courses it sells - its product is the judgment about which ones are worth an employer's time, and the plumbing that gets them into that employer's existing learning management system without a rip-and-replace.
e-learningcorporate trainingcourse marketplaceLMS integrationcomplianceleadershipupskillingB2B SaaS
