CYPHER Learning Reviews

This is our institutional education platform. We use it for our virtual programs, to support face-to-face programs, and for teacher training.

The platform gives us the opportunity to help students advance and personalize their goals.

Using CYPHER Learning, we have been successful in identifying students who are not at the level they should be at. They can see a transparent and explicit rubric system that indicates what they have to do to get a good grade and that empowers students to achieve the grades they want.

CYPHER Learning saves us time on intervention strategies for students who need guidance, in particular. I don't know exactly how much time we save, but at the moment that a teacher identifies that a student is not handling a subject well, the teacher begins to use other didactic tools so that the student can commit. It also saves time in being able to correct exams. We are able to accurately monitor students, as the platform shows us who is behind and who is ahead, and that enables us to create strategies. The platform itself helps to systematize the process.

Students are not at the same level, and each one has their own learning process. Being able to also personalize learning through the platform makes it a very good tool for our educational progress. It helps generate a report so that we can follow up on students and that makes life much easier. Previously, that took a week, but now, it only takes a day to create that report.

Also, being able to generate creativity in students when working virtually, through games and other features, helps us to empower them while encouraging creativity and collaboration with classmates. The gamified learning environment is very satisfying, helping to make learning dynamic rather than static. The fact that students are empowered by that collaborative work makes the students begin to generate critical and analytical thinking and generate their own knowledge.

We have been able to reduce the number of professors and staff. We no longer have the entire research committee, the curricular committee, the direction of training, or new academic projects. We only have professors who teach the courses themselves, and a coordinator who monitors the program. It has saved us not only on personnel but also on the budget of our physical facilities. We have seen an improvement in the institution's financial resources.

It has also helped a lot to save money on printing and the need to buy books.

It is a very intuitive platform. We have been able to train adults, older people, who are not familiar with digital environments. These are people for whom it is usually a challenge to use a platform like this. When they use CYPHER Learning they develop well. The platform gives them training to help them on their way to excellence.

It is very easy for educators to communicate with students using CYPHER Learning. The entire community is on the platform and we all know the process. There is fluid, fast, and effective communication that consists of sources that give us what we need to continue our educational processes.

An important addition would be training so that we can exploit the platform much more. The platform is advancing and being updated. It is important to know and understand everything in more detail, and how to work with it. Other institutions haven't been able to handle it.

We have been using CYPHER Learning since 2019.

The platform has made a good impression when it comes to stability. It very rarely happens that the platform crashes. It is very stable and the content doesn't get lost. Above all, having the platform outside of our institution has been an advantage.

The scalability is very good.

Within the platform we have 427 students, 29 teachers, 13 administrators who are program coordinators, the training coordinator, and the director.

We have plans to increase our use of CYPHER Learning. Little by little, we are growing. We are launching six new programs in virtual mode and we are offering continuous education in virtual mode. We have worked with international companies for training where we have had 300 participants, so we’re not only growing on a national level but also internationally.

En una escala del uno al cinco, su apoyo es un cinco. Cuando haces un pedido de ayuda la respuesta es inmediata. No soy un profesional de la ingeniería, pero la ayuda que te brindan, la forma en que te orientan sobre cómo mejorar un proceso, es muy buena.

Positive

We met CYPHER Learning through a virtual education event. We were looking for a new vision for our institution and that was where our director encountered the platform for the first time.

We previously used Modul, but it does not offer us everything that CYPHER Learning offers. CYPHER Learning is more user-friendly.

The initial setup was simple, due to the management of the platform, but complex due to the integrator who did the initial work on the platform.

We are still implementing it. No implementation strategy was given. The integrator we had at first did a very basic virtualization and the experience with him was terrible. He set up the program and presented it but the virtualization did not function well.

Eventualmente, tuvimos que contratar a un experto para virtualizarlo adecuadamente. El experto es extranjero y conoce muy bien la plataforma.

When it comes to continuing education, we have seen a return on our investment in our courses. It has been very helpful to be able to start working with CYPHER Learning and that is the biggest return on investment for us.

CYPHER Learning's pricing works perfectly for our institution. They have taken into account smaller institutions and that provides great value.

We evaluated Blackboard Learning Management and other platforms, but it was definitely CYPHER Learning that suited our budgets and needs.

When it comes to CYPHER Learning's automation for helping to set trigger rules to show or hide specific content, I would rate it at 8.5 out of 10. It's not that the platform is not providing us with all the tools to develop things. Rather, it's not a 10 because, as the platform develops, we have to adapt again to every new version. I feel that we have fallen behind, but that is more on us and our capacity than the platform’s fault. The platform has updates and improvements and although our process of adapting to these changes is slow, we are still seeing great progress regarding the capacity of the platform. 

I rate CYPHER Learning highly because of how well it is adapted for people who do not know how to handle digital environments. You can create content from scratch and potentiate it as much as you want. On other platforms, you feel limited and those platforms aren't so user-friendly. They cannot generate as many communication spaces as CYPHER Learning can. For example, if I am connected in CYPHER Learning and someone sees that I am connected, interactive chats are generated and a solution can be given to the students immediately.

It is a platform that will easily adapt to your school, whether it's basic, primary, or university education. It is a platform that provides many tools to help develop as an institution and generate educational and training progress for the community. It helps you to virtualize your institution.

Education is a subject we have to work on day by day. Everything is changing and evolving and we have to adapt to the processes of the new generation. Technology is part of the challenge of this new way of life, generating more relevance. That is what I have learned using CYPHER Learning.

Foreign Language:(Spanish)

¿Cuál es nuestra razón de uso principal?

Esta es nuestra plataforma de educación institucional. Lo usamos para nuestros programas virtuales, para apoyar los programas presenciales y para la capacitación de maestros.

¿Cómo ha ayudado a mi organización?

La plataforma nos brinda la oportunidad de ayudar a los estudiantes a avanzar y personalizar sus objetivos.

Usando CYPHER Learning, hemos tenido éxito en identificar a los estudiantes que no están en el nivel en el que deberían estar. Pueden ver un sistema de rúbricas transparente y explícito que indica lo que tienen que hacer para obtener una buena calificación y que empodera a los estudiantes para lograr las calificaciones que desean.

CYPHER Learning nos ahorra tiempo en estrategias de intervención para estudiantes que necesitan orientación, en particular. No sé exactamente cuánto tiempo ahorramos, pero en el momento que un docente identifica que un alumno no está manejando bien un tema, el docente comienza a utilizar otras herramientas didácticas para que el alumno se comprometa. También ahorra tiempo al poder corregir exámenes. Podemos monitorear con precisión a los estudiantes, ya que la plataforma nos muestra quién está atrás y quién está adelante, y eso nos permite crear estrategias. La propia plataforma ayuda a sistematizar el proceso.

Los alumnos no están al mismo nivel, y cada uno tiene su propio proceso de aprendizaje. Poder personalizar también el aprendizaje a través de la plataforma la convierte en una muy buena herramienta para nuestro progreso educativo. Ayuda a generar un informe para que podamos dar seguimiento a los alumnos y eso hace la vida mucho más fácil. Anteriormente, eso tomaba una semana, pero ahora solo toma un día crear ese informe.

Además, poder generar creatividad en los estudiantes al trabajar virtualmente, a través de juegos y otras funcionalidades, nos ayuda a empoderarlos al mismo tiempo que fomentamos la creatividad y la colaboración con los compañeros. El entorno de aprendizaje gamificado es muy satisfactorio y ayuda a que el aprendizaje sea dinámico en lugar de estático. El hecho de que los estudiantes se empoderen de este trabajo colaborativo hace que los estudiantes comiencen a generar pensamiento crítico y analítico ya generar su propio conocimiento.

Hemos sido capaces de reducir el número de profesores y personal. Ya no tenemos todo el comité de investigación, el comité curricular, la dirección de formación y nuevos proyectos académicos. Solo tenemos profesores que imparten los cursos ellos mismos, y un coordinador que monitorea el programa. Nos ha ahorrado no sólo en personal sino también en el presupuesto de nuestras instalaciones físicas. Hemos visto una mejora en los recursos financieros de la institución.

También ha ayudado mucho a ahorrar dinero en la impresión y la necesidad de comprar libros.

¿Qué es lo más valioso?

Es una plataforma muy intuitiva. Hemos podido formar a personas adultas, mayores, que no están familiarizadas con los entornos digitales. Son personas para las que suele ser un reto utilizar una plataforma como esta. Cuando usan CYPHER Learning se desarrollan bien. La plataforma les brinda capacitación para ayudarlos en su camino hacia la excelencia.

Es muy fácil para los educadores comunicarse con los estudiantes usando CYPHER Learning. Toda la comunidad está en la plataforma y todos conocemos el proceso. Existe una comunicación fluida, rápida y efectiva que consiste en fuentes que nos brindan lo que necesitamos para continuar con nuestros procesos educativos.

¿Qué necesita mejorar?

Un añadido importante sería la formación para que podamos explotar mucho más la plataforma. La plataforma avanza y se actualiza. Es importante conocer y comprender todo con más detalle y cómo trabajar con ello. Otras instituciones no han sido capaces de manejarlo.

Un añadido importante sería la formación para que podamos explotar mucho más la plataforma. La plataforma avanza y se actualiza. Es importante conocer y comprender todo con más detalle y cómo trabajar con ello. Otras instituciones no han sido capaces de manejarlo.

¿Por cuánto tiempo he usado la solución?

Usamos CYPHER Learning desde 2019.

¿Qué pienso sobre la estabilidad de la solución?

La plataforma ha causado una buena impresión en lo que respecta a la estabilidad. Muy rara vez sucede que la plataforma se bloquea. Es muy estable y el contenido no se pierde. Sobre todo, tener la plataforma fuera de nuestra institución ha sido una ventaja.

¿Qué opino de la escalabilidad de la solución?

La escalabilidad es muy buena.

Dentro de la plataforma tenemos 427 estudiantes, 29 docentes, 13 administradores que son los coordinadores de programa, el coordinador de capacitación y el director.

Tenemos planes para aumentar nuestro uso de CYPHER Learning. Poco a poco, vamos creciendo. Estamos lanzando seis nuevos programas en modalidad virtual y estamos ofreciendo educación continua en modalidad virtual. Hemos trabajado con empresas internacionales para capacitaciones donde hemos tenido 300 participantes, por lo que no solo estamos creciendo a nivel nacional sino también a nivel internacional.

¿Cómo son el servicio de atención al cliente y el soporte?

En una escala del uno al cinco, su apoyo es un cinco. Cuando haces un pedido de ayuda la respuesta es inmediata. No soy un profesional de la ingeniería, pero la ayuda que te brindan, la forma en que te orientan sobre cómo mejorar un proceso, es muy buena.

¿Cómo calificaría el servicio y soporte al cliente?

Positiva.

¿Qué solución usé anteriormente y por qué cambié?

Conocimos a CYPHER Learning a través de un evento de educación virtual. Estábamos buscando una nueva visión para nuestra institución y ahí fue donde nuestro director conoció la plataforma por primera vez.

Anteriormente usábamos Modul, pero no nos ofrece todo lo que ofrece CYPHER Learning. CYPHER Learning es más fácil de usar.

¿Cómo fue la configuración inicial?

La configuración inicial fue simple, debido a la gestión de la plataforma, pero compleja debido al integrador que realizó el trabajo inicial en la plataforma.

​​¿Y el equipo de implementación?

Todavía lo estamos implementando. No se proporcionó ninguna estrategia de implementación. El integrador que teníamos al principio hizo una virtualización muy básica y la experiencia con él fue pésima. Configuró el programa y lo presentó, pero la virtualización no funcionó bien.

Eventualmente, tuvimos que contratar a un experto para virtualizarlo adecuadamente. El experto es extranjero y conoce muy bien la plataforma.

¿Cuál fue nuestro Retorno de inversión?

Cuando se trata de educación continua, hemos visto un retorno de nuestra inversión en nuestros cursos. Ha sido muy útil poder empezar a trabajar con CYPHER Learning y ese es el mayor retorno de la inversión para nosotros.

¿Cuál es mi experiencia con los precios, el costo de configuración y las licencias?

El precio de CYPHER Learning funciona perfectamente para nuestra institución. Han tenido en cuenta instituciones más pequeñas y eso aporta un gran valor.

¿Qué otras soluciones evalué?

Evaluamos Blackboard Learning Management y otras plataformas, pero definitivamente NEOCYPHER Learningse adaptó a nuestros presupuestos y necesidades.

¿Qué otro consejo tengo?

Cuando se trata de la automatización de CYPHER Learning para ayudar a establecer reglas de activación para mostrar u ocultar contenido específico, lo calificaría con 8.5 de 10. No es que la plataforma no nos proporcione todas las herramientas para desarrollar cosas. Más bien no es un 10 porque, a medida que se desarrolla la plataforma, tenemos que volver a adaptarnos a cada nueva versión. Siento que nos hemos quedado atrás, pero eso depende más de nosotros y de nuestra capacidad que de la plataforma. La plataforma tiene actualizaciones y mejoras y aunque nuestro proceso de adaptación a estos cambios es lento, todavía estamos viendo un gran progreso en cuanto a la capacidad de la plataforma.

Valoro mucho a CYPHER Learning por lo bien que se adapta a las personas que no saben manejar entornos digitales. Puedes crear contenido desde cero y potenciarlo todo lo que quieras. En otras plataformas, te sientes limitado y esas plataformas no son tan fáciles de usar. No pueden generar tantos espacios de comunicación como CYPHER Learning. Por ejemplo, si estoy conectado en CYPHER Learning y alguien ve que estoy conectado, se generan chats interactivos y se puede dar una solución a los alumnos de forma inmediata.

Es una plataforma que se adaptará fácilmente a tu escuela, ya sea de educación básica, primaria o universitaria. Es una plataforma que brinda muchas herramientas para ayudar a desarrollarse como institución y generar progreso educativo y formativo para la comunidad. Te ayuda a virtualizar tu institución.

La educación es un tema que tenemos que trabajar día a día. Todo está cambiando y evolucionando y tenemos que adaptarnos a los procesos de la nueva generación. La tecnología es parte del desafío de esta nueva forma de vida, generando más relevancia. Eso es lo que he aprendido usando CYPHER Learning.

We use it to provide online courses for distance learning students.

We have both teachers and admin staff who work with the platform. Teachers can see student submissions and our admin staff can manage our course content and eCommerce.

We can customize our ordering system so we can have the data that we need to communicate with our students, their families, and our staff. 

We can collect surveys, using the LMS platform, from our students on how their courses are going. 

The ordering process is automated. When students register for a course, their course is set up automatically. We can manually register them when needed, as needed.

CYPHER Learning has helped by providing a variety of activities to help students get engaged, developing their independence and higher-order thinking skills. The quizzes and tests help keep our students engaged in developing their skills. I would rate the importance of this as 10 out of 10 for our organization.

CYPHER Learning has helped us save time on intervention strategies for students, especially those who need guidance. 

We provide a great program and having a top LMS system is essential. Our students love the platform, from what we hear. One of the things that they love about our courses is the LMS system's ease and use.

The navigation is easy to use. 

It is very easy for educators to communicate with students using the CYPHER Learning messaging system, which is imperative for our organization.

There are many applications available as add-ons. There are so many that we have not used all of them, but are happy to know we have more than we currently need.

It can maintain an infinite database of our students.

The solution is top-notch for tagging classes and assignments. The tagging is great for ensuring that the content is compliant with standards.

I have been using it for nine years. Our company started delivering programs in 2010, and we started using CYPHER Learning in 2013.

CYPHER Learning is definitely a stable solution. We have experienced less than 1% downtime.

The platform is set up so there are no capacity limits. Our program can grow as much as we want it to grow. We don't have any constraints around how many more courses we can offer or how many students we can add. There are no constraints around that.

The scalability is infinite. There aren't any limitations on what we can or can't do.

Their tech support is top-notch. When there is an issue, we are always able to find a workaround that meets our specific needs. The tech support team help us with that. An example is using the reporting feature. If there is something that we need in a report and we can't get all the data in the default template of the report, then we can work with the tech support team who will show us how to customize it.

I would rate the technical support as 9.9 out of 10. It is almost perfect.

Positive

Before we moved to the CYPHER Learning platform, we tried another vendor and it didn't work.

We used another vendor in the beginning, which was low cost. We were a brand new company then, so we used what we could afford at the time. We switched because CYPHER Learning has everything. We were going to have to keep adding to what we had with the previous solution, so it was going to become cost-prohibitive.

I had an IT specialist, who was looking at our current system, recommend CYPHER Learning. He did a little research, and said, "This is the one you need." When we started using them, he was more than right.

The initial setup is easy. 

It took just one day to get it up and running. We were up the day that we started using it.

It is so user-friendly. You can create a course, and have that course up the same day. Though, it does depend on how much content is in your course.

One admin was initially needed for the deployment, which does depend on the size of the deployment. Now, we have four admins working on it. There are also teachers who upload content.

When I first started, I wanted the enterprise package. We had to build up our student base to get up to the number of students that we needed to be in that enterprise package. Then, we had a 100% return on investment within the first year of using the program.

Our time saving increased by 70%, going from manual to automated.

The solution has definitely helped us reduce our administrative work. It gives us the ability to provide distance learning for students who are not all in the same area, which is valuable. 

The amount of time that we need to use the LMS system to quantify things is minimal.

CYPHER Learning has 100% helped us save on costs related to printing materials, textbook acquisitions, and license fees. It is instant for our students when we update or come up with a new version of our programs because we use this platform. If we need to modify a quiz, update a course, or add new material, all our students receive that instantly. There is no reprinting. There are no out-of-pocket costs for us. Also, there isn't a time delay for students.

CYPHER Learning has helped reduce the number of staff needed to manage our learning management system (LMS). It would likely triple our staff and admin if we weren't using it.

We do a monthly subscription.

It is priced competitively. Their pricing is one of the best in the industry. They are not the cheapest solution, but they are not the most expensive. The value that they provide, for what we pay, is invaluable. There are no add-on costs.

We have been using it for so long, and we wouldn't use a different platform. It is the best platform out there. It has become part of our daily environment, where we use it all day long.

The solution's ability to bridge our student's learning gap is at the top of the industry.

I talk with other schools who discuss their platforms. They always want our platform.

Don't waste a lot of time evaluating other programs. This is the best one out there.

We have plans to increase our usage of CYPHER Learning.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

We are a training provider and CYPHER Learning is a place for us to put all of the resources for our instructors as well as our participants, past and present.

It has freed up admin time for my team members to do other things that are important. About 50 percent of our training is now asynchronous, whereas when we first purchased CYPHER Learning, we were 100 percent synchronous. It has allowed us to repurpose and reuse content. In that way, from a business provider point of view, we actually make income off of stuff we're repurposing. It's passive income, and that has been very helpful. And through surveys as well as through other organizations, we've tracked that there is actually no difference in the retention rate and in the outcomes of those who learn via asynchronous or synchronous, so that's been really helpful.

When it comes to costs, we have several textbooks that we've created and other resources that we used to have to print and send by mail. Now, we can house everything as an ebook or a PDF on CYPHER Learning. We've cut out printing and shipping costs. And the big thing is that as soon as the participant enrolls, they have access to everything. That's a nice feature. It's set up so that when they make a purchase, they're automatically put in. There's no delay for someone to get started or have access to the information. When we started our business 12 years ago, there was a delay because of shipping and the admin. We also used to mail certificates when people were done with the training, but they can be generated automatically, so we don't have to mail or print those either.

Before we put all of our resources into the system, just mailing and printing cost over $50,000 a year. That's not in our budget anymore; there's no need for it.

And when COVID hit, we were ahead of the game because most of our competitors didn't have something like CYPHER Learning. We didn't miss a beat. We just took everything that was going to be in-person or onsite and moved it to our LMS using Zoom and some other platforms. Everything was already there for everybody.

In addition, we used to have our own shopping cart but then we learned that the platform actually has a shopping cart, so we were able to eliminate ours and that just streamlined the whole process for us. That has been a really nice feature.

The solution is in the cloud and that's one of the reasons we wanted it. We are a coach training organization, so anyone that is involved with our organization, the participants or faculty, can have access 24/7 as long as they have internet. The resources are housed there and it's password protected, which is nice. We also put attendance there, as well as videos because we have synchronous and asynchronous materials, so it provides us and our participants with access to everything, 24/7, wherever anyone is.

It's also pretty user-friendly. While they have all kinds of documents you can read, I've never read them. My admin team has read them, but I just logged in and was able to figure it out.

It also cuts down on admin time because past participants, instead of having to contact one of our team members, can go directly in and get their information.

In addition, the rules engine helps personalize content for users based on their goals and performance. That's very important because we want things to be very specific to our program and what we're offering.

It tells us when participants most recently accessed it and that's a nice feature. It does allow us, when people say, "I can't find anything," to see if they have logged in and say, "Well, you have to log in to find anything." And with our self-paced, asynchronous learning, the way CYPHER Learning is set up, participants have to watch the first video in its entirety before they can move forward to the next one. And we've had people that say, "Hey, I can't figure this out. It's not working well," but they haven't actually watched the videos entirely. I've never said this to anybody, but we've "caught" them trying to skim through.

It's very easy to monitor and check student progress. I can go in and, with a couple of clicks, see any participant and where they are in the process.

What we've been asking them for recently is that, while we really appreciate the shopping cart, it doesn't have a recurring payment charge. A lot of our participants, instead of paying the full fee, spread it out over several months and that feature is not there yet. CYPHER LEARNING said they would look into it. Typically, when we have made requests, it takes a while, but they'll research them and then make the improvements. 

I have been using CYPHER Learning for 10 years or more.

In all the years we've been with CYPHER Learning it has been there, and I don't get any hints that it won't be there. It has always been consistent and they've always been helpful. I wouldn't expect any changes that way.

From our experience, the scalability appears to be excellent. They have been scaling things up and adding things. It's more on us to take the time to look at what's there. For example, they have gamification, but we just haven't had the time to touch that. But it's there. It's ready to go if we want to use and incorporate it. 

We have about 250 users, including both students and trainers, but most of them would be students, past and present.

It is being extensively used by our instructors and administrative team, as well as by people when they first enroll. Once they enroll, they download everything they need, which is a nice feature too. And then we find that they access it once they've graduated, just to refresh themselves. We do notice a type of a drop-off once they've started the program. It seems like they have gotten everything and they're not in there a whole lot afterward, which is okay. That means they got what they needed.

We didn't have a previous solution.

Ten years ago the initial setup was pretty straightforward. Now, there are a lot more options, so you have to read the directions for the setup or contact their help desk. 

But once it was set up, when it came to the shopping cart and some of the asynchronous aspects, we just had to ask and then we understood, "Oh, that's how you do it." It's kind of like today's cars. You can't really do much more yourself than change the oil and kick the tires, but we like all those extra options.

We did it in-house. Even with all the bells and whistles today, you can do it in-house, as long as when you get stuck, you ask for help.

We have absolutely seen ROI. What we pay each year for CYPHER Learning is a drop in the bucket. Just the ability to set up self-paced classes has generated a nice income right there alone. I'm not ready to retire, but I could almost retire just on that income.

The main reason we went for it was cost, which was very reasonable. 

And what I like about the pricing is that you are only charged for what they label "active participants." They charge you monthly and, on average, we have 250 people that access the platform every month. We have many more than that, as far as students and participants go, but the others just didn't access it that month. If someone goes in once a month, you get charged for that person.

I believe there are pricing tiers as well.

Before we started with CYPHER Learning, we looked all around, but it offered a lot more, by far, and the price was the best. I regularly get flyers, information, and emails about other products just like this. I check them out and the price is a lot more and, in many cases, they're not offering as much in terms of those bells and whistles.

Based on other LMSs I've experienced, as I do continuing education, ours is right up there if not ahead, in terms of usability and what's offered.

Do your due diligence, look around, and explore. If you do a comparison, you'll very quickly see. There are a lot of features we don't use, but we don't feel like we're paying for them because it's a competitive price. We've been very happy with it.

We use it for internal staff training. We're a large retail hospitality company. We have over 1,000 locations in Australia and we are also a Registered Training Organisation (RTO). That means we deliver nationally recognized qualifications. We use CYPHER Learning to deliver our qualifications to employees who sign up to complete one of those qualifications. 

We also use it for our management training. Anyone who becomes a manager within our system goes through a training program that is administered through CYPHER Learning.

We have locations across Australia, with offices in every major city where our trainers are based. One of the best benefits we've seen with CYPHER Learning is that it has allowed us to act more consistently on a national basis in how we approach the delivery of our training. Our trainers and assessors can now train and assess anyone in the country, as opposed to just where they're physically located.

When we were paper-based, the trainees would send in their coursework to their local training facility. Having a cloud-based solution has allowed us to better use our trainer resources across the country.

The transition from paper to digital has also been beneficial. As an organization, we were spending over significant money each year on printing and positing our training materials. We've seen huge cost savings in completely converting to an online digital learning system. 

And when it comes to administration, another really great feature in CYPHER Learning is the flexibility in marking. We can choose which activities are auto marked and which have to be marked by a trainer, and that really allows us to save a lot of time. We know when something is a very simple yes/no answer, we can set that to be auto-marked. That way we can spend our trainer resources on marking the more complex responses, such as those that are essay-based.

The ability to build and customize our own courses is one of the most valuable features. When we launched with CYPHER LEARNING, their team helped us build our courses. They took our paper-based coursework and developed a really engaging digital solution on the platform. The best part, for us, is being able to continue to customize and edit it. We have been able to add and explore new features as we've grown with it.

We use the system's rules engine to help automate our training. For example, as a student completes one piece of training, the rules engine unlocks the next part automatically. We also send pre-written notifications at the end of courses or at certain touch points within courses. All of that is really useful as well.

Another good functionality is that we have full visibility into when students last accessed courses, because CYPHER Learning shows us when they last accessed the portal. That helps our trainers to follow up with people who might be falling behind or who need help. And another great, related feature is that we can see how long trainees have spent on certain activities. With digital learning, it can be easy to just click-click-click and skip through things. Seeing how long students have spent on the material helps trainers have good conversations with their trainees and test their knowledge, just to make sure that they really are grasping the concepts.

There is good reporting functionality and there are good insights into trainee progress. That certainly helps our trainers to know where to target their efforts and who to follow up on. If we are looking at individual trainees, we get very good insights as to how they're tracking, what section they're up to, and how long they're taking on particular activities.

If there is one area that I would like to see more improvement in, it would be around detailed reporting. There are some little things that they could add that would give us more insights and we'd like to access those things through the reporting.

There's a lot of reporting functionality, but we've found it a bit challenging integrating it with our different organizations and getting some of the information that we need out of it. We'd like to see the kind of information that we get about individual trainees, but as a whole, across the organization. That's where we'd like to see improvement.

We've been using the solution as an organization for almost three years. I've been using it for about 12 months.

We have had no issues whatsoever. It seems to be very stable.

With CYPHER Learning, there is a lot of untapped potential for us as an organization. I look at all the available features and the add-ons and the apps that are available, and I've got lots of different ideas about how we could start to incorporate different ways of delivering our learning. I am also thinking about other learning that we're not currently doing in CYPHER Learning, and moving it to this platform. There certainly is scalability there.

We definitely have plans to increase our usage by migrating other learning courses to CYPHER Learning and that will increase our active users quite significantly. We're three years in and, now that we're comfortable and happy with the platform, we've got plans to put more courses on it.

And from a coursework perspective, there's definitely scalability. We feel comfortable that, as we start to put more learners in the system, it will scale.

We already have a large cohort of learners in the system. We have over 100,000 employees with access to the platform and there are about 10,000 people actively learning each month, but we have no concerns about scaling it. We've been in discussion with CYPHER LEARNING and we have plans that we can put in place to get more people onto CYPHER Learning.

The users are predominantly restaurant crew and managers. There are also restaurant supervisors who are responsible for coaching people through the platform, and there are the trainers and assessors within our corporate office who administer the learning.

The technical support is very good. There's a support forum, which we utilize quite regularly and the responses come in quite fast. We usually get a same-day response or even within a couple of hours to any support tickets, which is quite good. You can choose whether your query is public or private. Unless it's company-specific, you can mark it as a public ticket and then other users of the platform get to learn from the answers as well.

Positive

I've used other learning management systems before, and in my current company our previous system was a proprietary, home-grown solution. The benefit of going with CYPHER Learning was that we got their expertise in digital learning, which is probably something that we were lacking. Our platform did its job for a period of time, but as technology advanced, and the ways trainees can learn online advanced, we needed to keep up with our competitors, and CYPHER Learning has really helped us to do that.

The initial setup was complex because it was quite a complex integration. We have 100,000 employees, so setting up data feeds to give users access, and revoking access when people are terminated, and those kinds of administrative tasks, can't be done manually. Setting up the API requests to handle those things took a little bit of time, until we got things right. 

CYPHER LEARNING were very good to deal with and they assigned people to us. I wasn't part of the initial setup, but from what I understand they worked very well with our organization.

From my perspective, having come in and managed the platform for the last 12 months, with CYPHER Learning we get notably less contact through our support desk around the system, compared to our other digital platforms. That's a really good thing; people aren't complaining about it. That's obviously a good sign that it's working as intended.

As for our implementation strategy, we did a pilot group first. We picked one region of learners and one particular course and that allowed us to make sure that we were capturing feedback, customizing the platform to our needs, and ironing out any problems before we launched it on a larger scale. 

Once we were happy with that particular region and that particular course, we rolled it out for all courses in that state. We continued to capture more feedback and worked with CYPHER Learning to make any adjustments. We then rolled it out state by state.

There has been a clear return on investment for us. Even taking into consideration the additional implementation costs and the costs for building custom courses, we're still seeing that it's cheaper to run CYPHER Learning compared to the paper-based learning that we used to do.

Our pricing is based on active participants. We have a large employee base, but we made sure that we went with a pricing model that only charged us for active users, as opposed to all employees. We only enroll an employee into a course if they need to complete that course. That just helps us keep our costs down. While we have over 100,000 employees, because we have fewer than 10,000 people actively participating in a course per month, we have a plan where we pay for 10,000 users per month.

Understanding how many active users you will have, compared to total users who may access the platform, is something to consider.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, we had some setup costs to build our custom courses. With CYPHER Learning you can either build your courses from scratch yourself or you can utilize their team to assist you in doing that. We've done half and half. We paid for CYPHER LEARNING to build some initial courses and, since then, we've actually built some of our own as well.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using CYPHER Learning has been to be open to new ideas. The CYPHER LEARNING team has experts in marketing and the creation of digital learning. We had courses that worked for us and that we wanted to do in a certain way, but they suggested new ideas and different ways of approaching them. Being open to those has allowed us to innovate the way that we deliver our training, which has been good for us. Being open to innovation and new ways of delivering our training has been a worthwhile lesson for us.

We onboard all our students into the platform and use it on a day-to-day basis for lessons, online classes, assessments, grading, and tabulation. We use it administratively and operationally.

CYPHER Learning is a core part of our students' journeys, as well as a core part of our lecturers' processes. Especially with the pandemic, everything has moved to digital. Today and for years to come, even if COVID is no longer around, the hybrid mode of learning will stay within our organization at least, because of the direction that our company is going. It's a nine out of 10, because we've built everything that we have operationally in CYPHER Learning. The product itself is amazing in terms of helping us to streamline all the processes and it saves us a lot of time.

The time savings are the result of a number of things. First, all tabulation of data has been automated. In the past, we would need to manually move things from paper to Excel and then do some manual calculations or use formulas in Excel to determine a student's grade. Now, we can set the rubric and everything is automated. If it is set up well, I just go in and export. That saves a tremendous amount of time. Another area that it helps us save so much time in is the administration of adding and updating student information, communicating with students, and making sure they are aware of what classes they're supposed to be in and their schedules. All that is communicated via CYPHER Learning. That has streamlined our processes and saved a lot of our time for the administrative staff.

We use CYPHER Learning for assessments but because most of our assessments go through Turnitin, the ability to integrate it with a lot of our third-party service providers like Turnitin, through a plugin, is helpful. There aren't many learning management systems that integrate so well with different APIs and LTIs, especially when a school has various tools in its tech stack. In addition to Turnitin, we are also subscribers of Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Skillshare. Integrating those platforms and having our user profiles, as well as progress and results integrated fully with our LMS, has been very helpful because it becomes like a one-stop center. Everything works perfectly and smoothly and is good for our customer experience.

Also, the way that we work is that our organization is a group of companies. We might have one program that we run in a couple of different schools. We can create content in one place and then very quickly duplicate the classes. CYPHER Learning has what it calls "parent" classes, that are like templates. We can duplicate them and create child classes from there. That makes content creation very easy. And it's very easy to update as well. We just update it in one place and sync it across all the child classes. It saves us time because we just do it once and then the system helps us to replicate it over time.

The ability to track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid is very important to us and it's not just for teachers and our lecturers. It's also helpful for our administrators. We have a talent management department that looks into job placements for students. Information on student skills development—what level of competency they have acquired thus far—is relevant to that team.

And especially for our pre-university program, we encourage lecturers to utilize the group function to reach out to students and communicate with them. That really opens up room for our students to ask any questions about a particular class. If a student is not very interactive in class, they have other means of reaching out to their lecturers.

When it comes to automating assessments and providing recommendations, I would rate the solution at eight, on a scale of one to 10. I just got off a call with our CYPHER Learning contacts this morning and one of the things that I brought up was that we have 100 percent of our students on the platform, but not 100 percent of our students have access to third-party platforms like Coursera, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning. Some form of customization would be good in terms of the API and how it integrates with third-party platforms. If we had control of that, I would give it a nine out of 10.

Also tagging classes and assignments with competencies is seven or seven and a half out of 10. We need the customization part sorted out so that we can control who has access to what kind of content. That's an area that needs improvement.

I would also like to see improvement to the mobile app, because our students are mobile-first. In our day-to-day interaction with students, if they can do everything on their mobile phones, that would be what they would appreciate the most. We know that's not entirely possible, especially when it comes to assessments.

Also, there are certain push notification features that I have noticed CYPHER Learning does not have. It does send notifications via the app, but not push notifications. I tested it this morning and it doesn't quite work, so that would be another area for improvement. Students really need the app to work better.

I have been using CYPHER LEARNING since 2016, but more extensively since 2019.

It's generally stable. Recently we've had some caching issues. Every once in a while we run into errors. But with the customer support team, everything feels very manageable. If a system fails, as long as the support team is able to answer our questions, we are able to provide the necessary support to our end-users. 

Overall, it's fairly stable, with occasional errors or problems. But the support team is top-notch and that gives us a sense of trust.

It's very scalable.

BAC Education Group consists of 42 companies, but in terms of educational institutions, there are six. One is a training company targeting working adults and professionals. The rest are tertiary education institutions. We deploy CYPHER Learning for all these institutions. We also use it for training and development of all of our 350 to 400 staff. In terms of location, we have students from across the region including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. They are all over Asia, especially in our postgraduate studies. Overall, we have about 8,000 users.

We use the product extensively for everything to do with learning and assessment. Administratively, we use it for student data and more. The product is great and fits our use case perfectly. All our assessments have been moved online, so CYPHER Learning is our source of information now. We generate reports to understand how our students are faring in a particular skill or for a particular assignment, or even on exams.

One of the things that has been a highlight for me is working with the team at CYPHER LEARNING and their customer support, which is incomparable to the support of most other products out there. We get assistance almost instantaneously. 

In our organization we get a lot of inquiries from students, especially when it comes to exams where students are highly stressed. If something happens to the system, we need an immediate solution or at least for the service provider to get back to us on what exactly went wrong. Working with their team has been extremely helpful. We can trust that at any point in time we're able to reach out to the customer support team. Sometimes we run our exams in the evening and submissions could be due at 11:59 PM. If something goes wrong at that time, students are extremely stressed out about whether their submissions went through or not. Their support has been very helpful in giving us, as the team that's facing our customers directly, peace of mind. And it indirectly helps our students as well because they get their inquiries answered fairly quickly. If there is anything I want to recommend CYPHER Learning for, it's definitely the support that has been given to us thus far.

Positive

BAC Education Group has colleges and nonprofits and we used Moodle previously for our colleges. We explored Canvas as well for some of our programs, because we are partners with certain universities. Our students do use both Canvas and CYPHER Learning, but internally we use CYPHER Learning. For the nonprofit side, we used Teachable before and we are now using a system called Thinkific.

In terms of cost, CYPHER Learning is about the same as what we were using but it's the product offering and the incomparable customer service that are the reasons we have stuck with it for so long. We've stopped using Moodle, Canvas, and Teachable. What drew us to CYPHER Learning is the integration, customer support, the product itself, and the look of the platform for our students.

The reason we're on Thinkific for our nonprofit side is that you pay a fixed amount and then you can reach out to as many students as possible. Because of the business use case, we opted for that rather than CYPHER Learning. Our team is used to CYPHER Learning and we would love for the nonprofit to move into it as well, but it's really difficult, especially because we have about 200,000 students on that platform. We would like to stick to CYPHER Learning, but cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense for a nonprofit.

We bought CYPHER Learning licenses in 2016. The initial team that was running the e-learning department is no longer around. My team and I took over in 2019 to relaunch it. We weren't there at the beginning in terms of deciding which platform to go with, but we were part of the implementation team and the onboarding and adoption.

When my team took over our organization's e-learning functions, we reached out to the CYPHER Learning team and started from scratch. It was fairly easy. We still had to figure out processes and standard operating procedures, because we were rolling it out campus-wide, but the CYPHER Learning team was very supportive and they were there when we needed answers.

The huge ROI for us is the fact that it's such a core product of our day-to-day offerings to our students. That really speaks volumes.

We have phased out printing some of our books, but the costs of printing have been moved to other requirements because we have had to invest in e-book readers.

For our for-profit entities, CYPHER Learning is the perfect solution in terms of cost. It is not too expensive and is about the same as what other service providers charge. 

In terms of competency-based learning, our college has just started looking into micro-credentialing. Most of our students have a set of classes they need to take and anything outside of that is up to their own discretion to pursue. But now, if a student is in the school of hospitality, for example, we don't just upskill them within the scope of hospitality, but we also try to impart or get them to complete courses in Coursera and Skillshare and LinkedIn Learning on things like communication skills or project management. We are starting to go into skills development, looking at the more holistic side of things, and that means looking into skills competencies. Micro-credentialing is very important and I would love to see CYPHER Learning really driving that and making it easier for students to display the talents and skills and projects that they've worked on in their profiles.

When it comes to skills development, a lot of it is about the content. CYPHER Learning has become that one platform that all of us, lecturers and students, use. It's like a staple in our everyday lives. It has been really difficult for us to inculcate that behavior. We've finally been able to. I'm very happy that the platform's features have helped us to get to where we are today. It plays a very core role in skills development for our students. It's the backbone of that process, along with our content.

I would definitely recommend using CYPHER Learning. We looked into various solutions prior to this one and there's a reason we have stuck with it for years. In fact, we have increased our subscriptions and onboarded new customers into it. I would definitely recommend CYPHER Learning, as long as it's for a for-profit organization.

We use it for grading and all my class assignments.

I used it during COVID. So, we had distance learning where we were doing Zoom, then I would still have the students do their assignments in CYPHER Learning during the distance learning.

I put the date in when I wanted students to be able to see an assignment. Then, I would have all the assignments in CYPHER Learning, but I wouldn't let the students see it until the day it was assigned.

I particularly like the discussions, which have been good for student engagement. Students can log in, and if we are having a discussion online, they can read everyone else's responses. They can also respond to what was said. I would have them comment on the other students' thoughts based on the discussion, and that was excellent. Organizationally, it was excellent because it is how I run my class, where all assignments are in CYPHER Learning. 

A lot of it has to do with just knowing your students and what their needs are. If I come across a student in CYPHER Learning, who is in my class, then I can grade according to whatever their specific needs are. I can help them in a class according to what their needs are.

Once you get your class set up in CYPHER Learning, you can reuse assignments or go to the library and find assignments. Once everything is in CYPHER Learning, you can reuse it, which is awesome.

I like the survey, quiz, and discussion features. The grading program is pretty good too. I do a lot of essays in my class. So, I will have prompts where students need to think critically about a reading, then they must write an essay about it. So, they are writing essays in CYPHER Learning, then I am grading them in CYPHER Learning. That is super helpful. This is why the discussion, quizzes, and surveys are super helpful, and probably the assignments that I give the most often.

Another feature that I like is having one class with three child classes. When I assign it to my parent class, then it gets assigned to all my child classes. All my students do the same assignments, but I might modify how I grade the assignment according to their needs.

It is easy for educators to communicate with students using CYPHER Learning. Students often message me through CYPHER Learning. Also, I can comment on students' assignments, then they are able to respond to the comment that I put in CYPHER Learning. There is an email feature. So, if a student sends me a comment, then I also get an email about it, which is also helpful. It is important for teachers and students to have dialogue regarding expectations. Also, students can ask questions about assignments and I can clarify information for students.

One thing that has been a problem is that CYPHER Learning doesn't save the students' work while they are doing it. For example, if you are on a Google Doc, and you close your Google Doc, then you come back, the work that you did has been saved. However, in CYPHER Learning, if for some reason the student clicks out of CYPHER Learning and goes back in, whatever they typed isn't saved. That is an area that they need to improve. A lot of my students may write an essay, but if they are two paragraphs in and their iPad crashes or something, when they go back, they are like, "All my work is gone." So, this would be an area that I would recommend for improvement in CYPHER Learning. It needs to auto save, and it doesn't auto save. That is definitely a weakness.

I have been using it for four years.

For four years, the stability has been good.

Our entire district uses CYPHER Learning. As far as that goes, it is good. Also, it is nice having a library where people save stuff and see what other people are doing.

There are approximately 1,500 teachers and 13,000 to 14,000 students who are using CYPHER Learning.

The product is being extensively used district-wide.

If I had questions, I was able to get my questions answered. We were able to give feedback to CYPHER LEARNING about different questions or features. CYPHER LEARNING was usually able to address whatever the questions or issues were, which was helpful. The auto saving thing is something that hasn't been addressed that I am aware of. So, that is an ongoing issue that hasn't been resolved.

I would give the technical support nine out of 10. Usually, they get back to me pretty quickly with a solution, for whatever the issue was.

Positive

Prior to CYPHER Learning, we didn't have an online solution. It was just old school.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. If I can learn it, anyone can learn it.

It is pretty intuitive. You need to set up your lessons. Since you will need to set them up somewhere, I feel like CYPHER Learning was pretty intuitive as far as what I needed to do as far as setting it up.

Any way you slice it, you will need to prepare your lessons. So, it doesn't take any longer in CYPHER Learning than it would any other way. It is a lot easier to have all your stuff in one place than to have a million papers flying around as well as having to grade papers. Having it all online is definitely better.

We have one tech coach at our school. If you have a tech question, you can go and ask them, then they will figure it out and help you. Anytime you do something new, you need professional development and training. So, we have tech coaches who help people to implement. So, if you are new, you can ask questions of the tech coach. 

The tech coach piece is good, providing ongoing support for teachers while they are implementing. That is a tip that is good protocol. That way, people aren't getting frustrated with it. At first, certain teachers didn't really like the grading thing. They were like, "Oh, I like Easy Grade Pro, and I want it to be Easy Grade Pro." I am like, "It's not like Easy Grade Pro, so just get over it."

When I do a survey, CYPHER Learning is helpful because then I can more quickly peruse students' responses. I don't have to go through question by question. Grading-wise, it has certainly helped, when giving a survey, to streamline my grading for that assignment.

I am sure there was some type of analysis that went into choosing CYPHER Learning. However, in the end, when the district selected CYPHER Learning, everyone was happy with it.

There is not much gamifying through CYPHER Learning. I do a lot of other activities in my class through other solutions, like Blooket, Quizizz, and Kahoot!. That is how I do gamification in my classroom.

Overall, it is a good learning management system and provides a good way to organize your class.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. The auto-save thing is the reason why they are not getting 10 out of 10.

I am a computer science teacher and I use it to help facilitate my class. I'm not a typical "sage on the stage" teacher, I'm more like a "guide on the side." I use CYPHER Learning to fully implement my curriculum for my students.

Automation helps save time when it comes to the assessment of assignments. I can set up some assignments so that the platform automatically grades students. I can spend more time developing content and not so much time grading. Taking the time to set it up properly helps with that automation, and the students get immediate feedback so they know exactly how well they've done. I can then look at the analytics, once they've done those assignments, and gauge who's doing well and who needs a little bit more help. It's very important and helpful.

I throw in a survey-type self-assessment for my students. I can go through each lesson and I can see how well they think they did versus how their actual grade matches up. I can identify students or classes to go back to and say, "Maybe we're going to take a little bit more time on this content." I can do that one-on-one or in a small group as well. It's essential in helping me to identify who needs help or who's ready for more advanced lessons or assignments.

CYPHER Learning is also very efficient when it comes to helping me understand how well my students understand concepts, by using the assessments, analytics, and feedback. My students can interact with me within the system to let me know if they have questions. I can engage with them as they're working and field questions or clear up anything that they may have an issue with.

Another benefit of the platform is classroom management. When my students know exactly what they need to be doing, it cuts down on the extra time that could lead to poor classroom management. It's all about them buying in at the beginning and getting my students to invest in the system. They know what they're supposed to be doing. CYPHER Learning has been very beneficial in that way.

An aspect that is also extremely important is the fact that teachers can track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid. As an organization, that's one of the things our administrators look for when they come into the room, the objectives and the competencies, and what teachers are doing to help students achieve competencies with their pedagogy in the classroom.

CYPHER Learning helps me to provide self-pacing for students in my class. Because the system enables me to add videos and resources such as PDFs, a lot of that content is me in the video, so they don't have to go to outside sources. I can take care of those students who are proficient by giving them those materials, and that allows them to move along at their own pace. And for those students who need extra time on things, I have that time to spend with them while others move ahead. It helps me to reach everybody.

The system also helps reduce administrative work because it offers analytics and spreadsheet downloads. If I need to see grades for students, I can see them all at once or pull grade reports for individual students. I can look at individual grades from the different classes that I've set up that cover different competencies. I can print all of that out and share it with parents. Everything is right at your fingertips.

There are cost savings because it's all digital. There's really no need for printing. I can convert documents to PDFs or do videos. It really helps because it's online. I have to be out of school tomorrow, but I don't have to make copies of things for students or the substitute teacher. I just outline what my students are doing online and the substitute and the students know exactly what they need to be doing.

The mastery grid CYPHER Learning is the most important feature. With my curriculum, in Mississippi, we are required to keep up and track as our students master specific objectives and standards. With CYPHER Learning, that process is built-in. I can customize it to my liking, and I have all of that data right at my fingertips. It's amazing.

Similarly, the competency-based learning is also extremely important because, with my curriculum, in the state of Mississippi, funding is a key factor. We have to keep up with how well our students are doing on specific competencies and standards. I've got all of the data and the system backs it up. It's very critical.

Tagging assignments with competencies goes along with the mastery feature. When I'm looking at that mastery list, I can see assignments, lessons, a group of lessons, or a specific quiz I have tagged and I can immediately see which assessments match specific competencies and determine if I need to change things up or develop something a little bit more.

Gamification is another feature that I've recently really gotten into and I have found that my students really enjoy getting points and badges. That reinforcement is critical. One of the things that my school stresses is positive reinforcement for our students. With gamification, my students get that instant gratification. They get specific scores when they do specific tasks within CYPHER Learning and it lets them know. It's a really big motivator for my students.

The gamification aspect is extremely easy to use, as long as you have an idea of what you want to do. The system is very intuitive and you just create your game and your points. Another thing I like about it is that you can retroactively add points for something. You might think, "Hey, I want to give points for a specific task that has already been done." You can go back, create that point system or badge, and it will retroactively award the student who's already done that assignment as well as capture those who have yet to begin.

It's also very easy for students to use gamified learning materials. They just do the work; what they would already be doing. It doesn't take any extra effort for them to be involved in it because it's built into the assignments or the lessons. As long as they're doing their work and engaging with the system, they are rewarded for their participation.

And the reward automation is a time-saver for me. It's a set-it-and-forget-it feature. The system continues working after you set it up and you know that the students will be rewarded. The system is going to make sure that the students are aware that they are participating in it.

The platform is also really good in terms of integrations with other technologies. I use and integrate a lot of video content, with SCORM features, to create automated assignments. There are other websites out there, but CYPHER Learning makes it possible to have everything in-house for me and my students. It's a one-stop shop.

I'm able to manage all of my needs for all of my students on my own. From year-to-year, as I create content, I am able to tweak things or reuse assignments, which cuts down on the amount of time I have to spend on preparing.

While the number of apps available for integration with CYPHER Learning has increased over the years, I would love to see this number continue to grow. I believe this would help solidify its position amongst other learning management systems as a viable option for educators and schools.

I've been using CYPHER LEARNING since 2010 or 2011.

I'm extremely impressed, from year to year, with the things that they are doing as far as keeping up with how the platform should look and what it should offer. It's always ahead of where other LMSs are.

They have been very responsive to my needs. There is an online support system that you go to if you're having an issue.

Positive

The initial setup was completely straightforward. When I began using CYPHER Learning it was as simple as getting the URL and sharing it with my students. I don't think it could get any simpler than that. Because I'm in a computer lab, I have my students save that web address in a bookmark.

There is minimal maintenance. For any issues that are encountered, CYPHER LEARNING is very responsive.

I have absolutely seen a return on investment. It shows students their percentage of completion and I'm getting more students to do more work. They see what they have to do. They'll say, "I'm at this percentage of completion, and this is my mastery so far." The buy-in is worth it to get that from students.

Some of the previous solutions I used were free, but I feel that it's worth it to pay for CYPHER Learning and get that autonomy and creativity and personalization. I feel that students want and need something that is not just the status quo. They want to be able to engage with something that speaks to them, so they're not just trying to check a box on an objective. It actually gets them involved in the process of learning. It gets a student to say, "Ok, this is something I have to do, but I'm really enjoying what I have to do. I get to interact with my teacher and with other students." That was something that some of the other platforms were lacking.

The pricing is worth the peace of mind that it gives teachers, due to the ability to create an experience for their students. It's not just about the assignments they have to do. Teachers can create a narrative and a direction for their students and have them immersed in that environment. Learning is something that all students have to do, but why not make it fun? Why not be able to offer an experience that is engaging and that allows them to participate and add to that narrative?

I had worked with several different LMSs because, in the state of Mississippi, when you're going to teach my specific subject, you go through training on different LMS platforms. I found that a lot was lacking in those platforms and that CYPHER Learning gives me more autonomy, creativity, and personalization in my class compared to Blackboard, Google Classroom, or Moodle. Now, the state of Mississippi uses Canvas, but I still prefer to use CYPHER Learning.

One of the main things that I really loved when I initially started out with CYPHER Learning was that it was different from everything else out there. They keep up the user interface and it's like an encompassing community for my students. That way, they're not having to go to a lot of different websites for much of what they're doing. I can set it up to minimize distractions and the need to go to different websites to do assignments.

Also, CYPHER Learning serves as an extension of myself, my teaching philosophy, and the experiences that I want to give to my students. When they're working through a lesson, in a sense, they're sitting down and working with me personally, and that's something that I strive to do ahead of time. It may take a few extra minutes, and maybe hours, upfront, to capture that opportunity for my students to be working with me, but it's worth it. So the platform is just an extension of me and I'm able to get all the creativity out there and encourage my students to be as creative in how they interact and engage. I can promote the joy of learning.

Another factor was ease of use. A lot of the other platforms that I used didn't have the intuitiveness that I have with CYPHER Learning. It made me want to explore and use as many features as possible to get the most out of it for my students.

I feel that CYPHER Learning is always ahead of the curve when it comes to educational technology. It's really helpful that they have a roadmap of things that they are looking to implement. They're keeping up with the trends in education. And we are also able to provide feedback directly to them. They're constantly working to improve the platform. I couldn't ask for anything more specific because I feel they're already on top of it. But if there were something that they needed to add, they're always open to suggestions.

My advice would be to look into the ability that CYPHER Learning offers for teachers to create their own paths for their students; the autonomy, creativity, and personalization provided by CYPHER Learning. Also, consider the automation and being able to create content or assessments that work for you and don't add to your time. There are only so many hours in the day for educators, administrators, or people in the industry. It's a platform that works with you to see you through to the goals that you envision.

CYPHER Learning houses everything I need to function, day-to-day, in my classroom.

For the most part, the customer support is very responsive. There were a few occasions when we weren’t getting the answers that we needed so we contacted our company rep, and he jumped right in, so the process got moving very quickly all of a sudden. Mostly, we have been able to find what we need in the knowledge base, and when we can't, we usually get a pretty good response from customer support.

The main benefit of using the solution is that we can reach a worldwide audience we couldn't before. In the past, we relied on in-person events, but with CYPHER Learning, we have people worldwide using our platform. We can reach a wider audience and constituent base than before by many multiples.

For example, we will be working with an East African organization that works with businesses across the same region, and they'll be using our platform as they are English-speaking. Previously, we could never even consider reaching such an audience. The National University of Singapore also uses our courses to teach their MBA students; the solution opened a new world for us to reach potential users. We're a non-profit organization, so we're not out to make money,
we're out to make a difference, and the platform helps us to do that.

With CYPHER Learning, we can make a tremendous difference primarily through the combination of compelling courses and a good platform. Of course, the courses need to be good, or the platform wouldn't necessarily matter.
Another benefit of using the solution is the ability to add dubbing or voiceovers to our courses.

The platform can adapt to that by having the instructions in many other languages. This opens up our audience and gives our courses a greater potential reach.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to use private external portals through which we can sell our courses. This feature is one of the primary reasons we stitched from our previous LMS, as it allows us to grow and customize the portals within CYPHER Learning for specific clients, and that's huge. 

The ability to create learning pathways is of great benefit, as is the capacity for us to provide certificates of completion at the end of a particular course or learning pathway. 

Our customer support rep has been fantastic, especially as we were up for renewal. He was very responsive and able to bring in the staff required to work on our renewal. The primary sales representative we worked with was also excellent; how they stepped up and worked with us made a big difference in our decision to renew our contract for another five years.

CYPHER Learning's features are enormously helpful to our process and efficiency; we did a comprehensive analysis before we moved from our last LMS, and the features, customization, available APIs, and support made a huge difference for us.

The search function needs to be improved; it isn't currently working correctly and has no value to us at this point, but it should be of great value. To my knowledge, CYPHER Learning is presently working on this issue.

The content player within CYPHER Learning could use some improvement, particularly in how it scales – the player is not responsive to the browser window being resized, so content is often cut off which is a big frustration. We want a fully responsive content player. That's one area where our previous solution was fantastic, so it needs to be worked on at CYPHER Learning.

We've been using CYPHER Learning for around two years.

The solution is very stable; we've never had an issue outside of a bit of downtime here and there.

For the most part, the customer support is very responsive. There were a few occasions when we weren’t getting the answers that we needed so we contacted our company rep, and he jumped right in, so the process got moving very quickly all of a sudden. Mostly, we have been able to find what we need in the knowledge base, and when we can't, we usually get a pretty good response from customer support.

Positive

We previously used Docebo LMS and switched because we found CYPHER Learning to be a more complete solution. What we didn't like about Docebo is that many features and capabilities are paid add-ons, so the cost kept increasing. The CYPHER Learning team was also fantastic in setting up a sandbox for us to play in and answering any questions we had. We felt that CYPHER Learning provided a cleaner, more navigable admin interface which made it easier to work within the LMS. We looked at many different companies, but they stood out to us by being accommodating and ensuring all our questions were answered. Docebo's customer support was another reason we switched- many of our support tickets were left unresolved for several weeks or even months and their support team seemed to lack a solid understanding of their own product.

Another reason we switched is that Docebo doesn't do a good job with external portals, and CYPHER Learning does an excellent job. We handle the sales of our CYPHER Learning courses externally through a purpose-built website, and Docebo had no option for APIs, which was frustrating. CYPHER Learning does a much better job supporting us; they have been very accommodating, and though we ran into some difficulty during the initial configuration of the API, their tech team worked with us to ensure the API worked out.

There were both straightforward and complex elements to the deployment. Moving from one platform to another that functions differently involves some complexity. Still, we were extremely pleased by how quickly the CYPHER Learning team answered our questions and how readily the solutions team assisted us. Part of our switch from Docebo to CYPHER Learning included some hours with their customer support and tech teams, many of which we didn't use as the deployment was relatively straightforward. We figured out the solution and got rapid answers from customer support for questions when they arose.

We implemented the solution in-house, with support from the CYPHER Learning tech and customer support teams. 

Our organization is a nonprofit, so we're not out to make a high ROI; we need to make enough to develop new courses, maintain ongoing ones, and so on. However, we wouldn't have signed with CYPHER Learning for five years if we didn't think we could make it work from an ROI standpoint. CYPHER Learning gives us the ROI required to sustain our organization via the solution's pricing and capabilities.

During the negotiation for our five-year contract, CYPHER Learning did an excellent job of being fair and upfront with us. We have to budget for the future and know what the solution will cost us over the next five years. That's fantastic, and the company was very accommodating and worked well with us.

Everybody always wants the price to be lower, but realistically, if the price were significantly lower, that would make us happy in the short term, but it may put CYPHER Learning out of business in the long term. In our case, the deal we came to was a win-win. 

The only issue I have with the pricing is that there's a new component called CYPHER Care, and we only use a few elements of it. So, we had to buy CYPHER Care without requiring the complete feature set, but I understand why they need to simplify the pricing. I'd rather it be simplified than the complexity that Docebo threw at us.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product for hybrid training; we have many blended learning courses. For example, we require users to go through four courses in the platform, after which they can enroll in a webinar where they can get involved in a discussion on the subject matter. The blended learning model is significant for us. Another example is that we have in-person seminars where we would have around 100 CEOs. Before going to the workshop, they must complete several courses as a
prerequisite, after which they can attend the two-and-a-half-day seminar. Following that, other courses open up, allowing continued learning and application of the skills.

The platform's automation for triggering actions - whether that be completion actions, enrollment actions, etc. is extremely beneficial to us- we use automation to recommend the next courses in a series, send notification emails, and provide completion certificates. We don't currently use the badges etc., as we don't consider them essential.

We don't utilize the product's capacity to recommend courses or assignments to learners based on their job titles or competencies as we design our own learning pathways. The recommended course feature isn't significant for us.

CYPHER Learning hasn't reduced our training costs, as we don't use it for that. However, it reduces training costs for our clients as they can use our courses to learn without paying to get us there.

To someone looking for an LMS but who has never heard of CYPHER Learning, we would recommend the platform to them, and we have. We may already have sent some clients in their direction, and one of the best sales tools would be to have potential clients go into our system and see how robust, powerful, and capable it is. We've recommended the solution to people before and will continue to do so. Based on our experience over the past 2 years, CYPHER Learning is a platform that we recommend.

Before purchasing the solution, I advise potential customers to understand the pricing, including what it will be moving forward, so they can build that into their long-term projections. Secondly, understanding the platform's capabilities and whether they work for you is essential. The best way to do that is to ask for a sandbox that you can play around in to see if the product does what you think it does and whether it meets your company's requirements. Tech vendor salespeople
are pretty good, but the reality tends to be not quite as rosy as the picture they paint. So, some due diligence is required regarding understanding the capabilities.