CYPHER Learning Reviews

It's a learning management system for students to log into and use, and for teachers and mentors to go into and check on students. Parents can also go in.

We have hundreds of students a month who go through the platform. We use the platform to produce reports which assist us with compliance.

The system is so good that we rarely have to even physically talk to any of our clients on the phone. It's just fully managed online and manages the whole process from the start of the student engagement all the way through their training, communicating with them via the platform, and completion of their training. It's one of the few platforms that just works.

I have a philosophy in business: Whenever my phone rings from one of my customers I assume I'm doing something wrong. For example, I may talk to one of my schools in Victoria, one that runs our platform, three times a year, and it is me chasing them up saying, "I haven't heard from you, is everything all right?" It's just that they love it because they can fully manage it themselves and everything they need is there. They have never contacted me and said, "Laurie, I can't do this," or "This is wrong," or "Why can't we do this?"

When a solution works for your business such that you can sign up a customer and you don't need to talk to them, and they're happy, what better rapport is there than that? It blows me away that I have schools that just don't call me (as all communication is via the CYPHER Learning) and that's a good thing. I can then focus on other things and not get bogged down on issues.

And when clients don't ring you, you have no costs. There's no cost to reduce because it has created a sense that you don't need those costs. I have probably reduced costs by 95 percent because I don't have them.

In addition, when it comes to saving money on training facilities or on travel that was involved in training, you almost can't put a price on it. When you physically go and do training out there, you have to charge a minimum of about $1,500 a day, plus flights and everything else, for a class, and that's cheap. There are expenses on top of that such as learning materials. And when you're out teaching you're not doing anything else.

Instead, I can be here and, with the platform working, I can build my business. Instead of working in the business, you're working on the business. And you're not going to be as successful in business if you're continually working in it. If you're a plumber, when you're fixing that person's tap you're not working on your business, you're working in it, and it's never going to grow. This platform allows you to work on your business and let the business evolve. I can take on hundreds of schools and thousands of students with this platform and it won't make any difference to me whatsoever. I don't need extra trainers or classrooms to do so. It's future-proofing where my business is heading.

This platform allows me to supply my niche market better than anyone else can. If it weren't for this platform, I wouldn't have an edge over the other companies. Even if they know what I'm telling you—and they know it—they're still not going to do it because they don't get it.

The main reason I chose this software is the competency-based learning feature that helps make sure the learning is compliant. It's probably the best on the market.

In Australia we have things like performance criteria, knowledge evidence, and performance evidence that we have to map to assist with our compliance. One of the requirements that we needed a system to meet is something that CYPHER Learning has, a feature called mapping. In CYPHER Learning, when you write an assessment or do an activity, you can map it back to those criteria and generate a report for compliance. That report shows that you are covering every point that you need to cover in the training to issue a national qualification. This is one thing that CYPHER Learning does extremely well.

In Australia, when we get audited, they map our training on our potential for how we are going to deliver it. It's called a mapping document. It is fantastic for reporting, and it assists in compliance.

Another thing it does extremely well is that students have a seamless, easy process to follow. The parents can also log in and see what the students are up to. The teachers at the school and the mentors can log in and give advice on assessments. The training coordinators at each public school or private school can log in and see the progress of the students. Each school is able to have its own portal (organisation) where all the school activities are only visible to that school's own students, staff and parents.

Another feature is that it's simple to use.

You are also able to see who has not accessed the portal and follow up with those people. The reporting process is really good. You can click a button and it displays all the dates and you can see the last time that they logged in and you can see exactly what they accessed. The reporting on it is second to none.

There are improvements that are needed and things that they could do a bit differently, and they're all in the suggestions we make. And CYPHER LEARNING will bring them out, but they're only minor things that are focused on the way that I run my business.

One example is the email integration. When we send out an email to a customer that says, "Welcome, here's your enrollment and this is what you do," if it bounces back because that email address is not correct, CYPHER Learning won't tell you that your email bounced back. What I've done, as a result, is set up an external email system where I now get bouncebacks reported to me.

That's not a feature that the program has, but it would be a cool feature if the program did it. Because when you have invited somebody into the system, you're waiting and you're thinking, "This guy, he hasn't logged in," and you can start abusing your customer. Meanwhile, he is saying, "I never got the email." Then you find out that he gave you the wrong email address, but the system doesn't tell you. That's just me being really critical, and it's not disrespecting CYPHER Learning. It's not built as an email program, it's built as a learning management system. That's what they're good at.

Another feature that I would like has to do with the e-commerce side, which is only for one business. In my case, I am a business and different organizations run their own training under my business. The e-commerce is associated with my business. When one of my customers runs training courses, they cannot process the payments through their account, they have to go through my account. It would be helpful if they separated out the e-commerce. Again, that is not a learning management system's problem, it's not e-commerce software, but that would be a cool feature. It's not a negative about the software. It's just me being particular.

I've been using the CYPHER Learning for well over six years. My current business has only been using it for the last two or three years but, in total, I have been using the platform for that long.

It's 100 percent stable. No problems at all. None.

I could quite easily have thousands of students in it and it wouldn't be an issue. It's the only solution that is going to scale with our business. I give 100 percent on scalability.

When you get the guys that really know what they're doing, the support is a 10 out of 10. I'm not going to rate them a nine because they are a 10. You just get that feeling. You get to know the guys that aren't quite on top of things and you just avoid them and go on to the guys who know what they're doing.

You put an issue on the support chat. When some of the guys reply to it, I know what to say and I know when to reply to get the right guy back. About 90 percent of the guys there are brilliant. It's just the new guys who don't understand things as well and struggle a little bit sometimes, but they always get back to you quickly.

Every now and again there are little quirks and bugs, but the support is absolutely brilliant. They'll usually get back to you quite quickly. 

Sometimes they don't understand exactly what I'm saying but that's just because I have one way of explaining it. At the end of the day, not one problem that I've had hasn't been resolved.

And about 80 percent of the issues that I've raised have been due to me not understanding the platform. And that's just been a matter of learning the platform. When you understand it, it is amazing.

There are always improvements that could be made to the platform, but that's just a personal opinion. And every time I have come up with a personal opinion, the support guys have said, "Mate, that's great. Can you log it as a feature request?" Sure enough, people vote on it, and the feature comes out. They're very open to suggestions. I'm a developer myself. When you develop things, you don't know what you don't know. Until you start using it and finding better ways to do something, you just don't know. I've always got suggestions but, in general, looking at all the LMSs out there, this is the best one.

Positive

We were using Talent only because we didn't know this existed. Talent, as a solution, was cheap and cheerful, but it sort of worked. But that was six or seven years ago when it was in its infancy.

For any new platform that you use, you go through a learning curve. This one was probably the easiest to learn. Was it straightforward? No. But it is the easiest platform to learn. Nothing is ever straightforward. When you buy a new car, you've got to learn it. When you buy a new laptop, you've got to learn it.

It has been a learning process but it's more about learning the features and how they work. When you learn them, they are excellent. It's the normal learning curve that you would have with any software, but I promise anybody who takes on this platform that it will be the easiest one to merge into. I'm not saying it's easy but it is the easiest to learn.

One way I evaluate software is that if I cannot work it out in the first couple of hours I'm not going to use it. Because if I can't work it out with my knowledge, how is my staff going to understand it? I was able to work CYPHER Learning very simply in the first hour and my staff picked it up extremely well.

As far as implementing it goes, we made a business decision to slow it down. But you could get this program and have it up and running within three to five working days, very easily. Anybody could adopt it, set up the e-commerce, set up the emails, understand it, and put the courses in. There's no reason why, within a week, you couldn't have a live program up and running, if you're motivated and really determined.

Even though it's priced higher than the cheap and cheerful solutions, the return on investment is going to be phenomenal. It does what you want it to do.

I looked at Blackboard Learning Management, Canvas LMS, TalentLMS, Udemy, and Thinkific. I've also looked at Moodle, which is brilliant, but it doesn't have a good SaaS solution. I wanted something that was managed by other people, whereas with Moodle, you have got to manage the IT yourself.

I have pretty much looked at all the platforms and tried everything. I have been trying out LMSs for the last 10 years or so. By far—and I'm not saying CYPHER Learning is the cheapest, as I can get something cheaper—when I did the price comparison for what you get, six years ago, CYPHER Learning was the best out there and I strongly believe it still is. 

I keep testing other ones and saying to myself, "Oh, I want to try and save some money." But when I look at the other ones they're just not comparable at all. They're great for mum and dad at home who want to sell courses online. But they don't take it to the next level. This solution takes it to the next level. Even McDonald's Australia is using this platform.

In the corporate world—I'm talking about the big end of town, and large training companies—this is the best solution. If mum and dad are working from home and want to do online training, it's probably not the platform for them. It is more of a professional, business-oriented and focused platform, and a platform for schools. It's not for "Ma and Pa Kettle." There are other solutions out there for them. But for the corporate world, and for what we do, it beats anything else on the market, hands-down.

We don't use the solution's automation because of compliance. For compliance, our assessors and trainers have to manually check up on the student. So we don't want it fully automated for that reason. I'm not saying it's not good, I have seen the automations in the system, but we prefer to have a manual process.

Obviously, an issue will always pop up. For every feature that our clients, our schools, have asked for, we have been able to come up with the correct solution on the platform. Not one of my customers has come to me and said, "It can't do this." I've always had a workaround solution for them.

Learning management systems are new to a lot of people. Only during COVID has the industry accepted that physical, classroom-style learning is changing. We've got a new program starting overseas and we're training mining companies in Papua New Guinea, using our platform. They can get the qualifications and come to Australia with them, and that helps them with their visa. A lot of training companies in Australia work on the model of being in a classroom and teaching people. Education training is changing.

Our working hypothesis was that in a scenario where the school would be closed to in-person classes for a long time due to COVID, we would need a professional online education system. We approached it as if we were never going to see face-to-face education again.

We feel that while other institutions have suffered a little more from the effects of the pandemic, the fact that we adopted and developed a platform that is very professional from the beginning, and exploited its resources to the maximum, enabled our institution to maintain a high level of education. We believe that in this year's national assessments, our school will continue to achieve first-place results.

We have been able to deliver our entire curriculum online for a year and a half. CYPHER Learning quickly solved the issue of having a means to deliver the curriculum. We have been able to focus, in the midst of the pandemic, on the well-being of the students, their emotional health, and support for parents. The level of learning has been quite high and the level of emotional control of the students is optimal.

We also feel that students feel safe. Something that has been quite surprising is the use of technology in the first grade with six-year-old students. We were a little skeptical about the technology issue for such young students. But with a little initial help from the parents, those students have become fluent in the use of the technology, like any other tool, and they move around it with ease. The level of autonomy that children can achieve is impressive.

The students flow with the platform, as it has a gamification process and stimuli. It engages very well with the essence of positive behavior reinforcement and allows me to recognize good work by students when it is done through the platform. And the synchronous work students do enables them to objectively see their own level of performance. They are also aware of being recognized by their teachers for their work, and this increases their engagement with the program.

The gamified learning environment allows us to create curricular spaces that are different from the traditional courses that the curriculum has. A teacher, for example, can decide to create a new workshop or specialization course for students who are interested in a specific subject. The teacher simply opens the channel and registers the students. They can choose that students from different grades interact with each other by sharing a course or a workshop, and this is interesting and novel.

CYPHER Learning has also significantly reduced paperwork for me, as well as the need for printing. There is less spending on paper supplies and CYPHER Learning is complemented by other tools that allow me to interact with students immediately. It has reduced my printing costs by about 60 percent.

Above all, what it has done is provide our team with more time available to focus on teaching and learning processes. It could help me reduce staff, but we have preferred to use the time it has freed up for our teachers to reinforce them in the pedagogical area. This is how we believe we will achieve better results.

The first point is the ease of use. It is a very easy platform to use, especially for students and families, with a very friendly layout.

It also has a series of support systems, including communication with parents, students, the ability to invoice for online courses, and other qualities that make the system very versatile and facilitate a teacher's work.

It has a good level of integration with different applications.

This LMS also allows us to do "differentiated instruction." It is a very effective tool for creating specific tactics that allow me to work with advanced students and with students who have learning difficulties. In this way, each student has an educational program focused on their personal characteristics. Thanks to this, our school has exceptionally high results on the Ministry of Education tests.

CYPHER Learning’s adaptive learning helps provide students optimal, personalized content based on their goals and performance. I really like this ability to adapt to the development of students. It is a contemporary feature, which should be pursued as an important educational process. It is making our work much easier.

The reports are fundamental. They have been super useful for personal follow-up with students. The fact that the system helps me to track the students in the delivery of work and the achievement of competencies allows our educational team to interact with the parents and children for cases in which special, focused help is necessary. This is very valuable. We have noticed in internal tests that students have achieved educational requirements though the distance-education system, and that the students are working hard. In other words, students who were experiencing some sort of void are filling that void by using this platform.

The fact that teachers can track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid makes our work much easier. Students are evaluated by their competencies, which is vital for us. It adapts very well to a modern teaching and assessment system. The assessment done with the platform meets contemporary demands and gives the school the opportunity to apply them. This is most advantageous.

It practically gives us another language for communication. As a director, I like to recognize students when they have achieved a good result or participated in a championship. Through CYPHER Learning, I am able to send them messages and I usually receive an immediate response from the students. In this way, as a director, I can quickly reach many people with a message of encouragement. It goes along with promoting positive behavior. This also includes students who have difficulty. If not for CYPHER Learning, I would have to go through a much more complex process to communicate with them.

CYPHER Learning provides a variety of activities to help engage students and develop their independence. We are a technological society that uses technology intensively. Introducing students to this system, beginning to automate certain teaching processes, and making it easier for students to access resources is something that is very relevant to the 21st century.

Furthermore, the solution's intervention strategies for students, especially for those who need guidance, are a great strength of this LMS. The fact that the platform allows me to create my own line of work helps a lot and enables students to achieve results and be recognized by the system for their successes. It is a fabulous tool. I put the work in place and students are quickly reacting and working. I can attend to it personally and help students advance in context.

The solution’s ability to bridge the learning gap for students is absolutely a great outcome and advantage. When students receive rapid feedback, they are always eager to excel in their studies and to advance. You create topics in which the level of difficulty increases, the student achieves the desired results, feels happy, advances, and the teacher can quickly recognize this.

I would like to see greater integration with some programs that are not natively integrated. Google is a standard. Everything integrates with it. Integration with Google is a key task.

Also, it would be interesting to have it integrate with the International Baccalaureate. There is a platform called ManageBac that has this type of integration. If CYPHER Learning would use that as a reference, it would increase its functionality and scalability.

We have been using CYPHER Learning for two and a half years.

We have never had stability problems with CYPHER Learning. Any downtime due to updates has always been preceded by notices, and the time the platform was in update mode was quite short so it has never been an obstacle.

When we started CYPHER Learning, it was as an individual school but we quickly scaled with CYPHER Learning so that all three schools in our group were incorporated. We made adjustments to share domains and the growth process went perfectly. If we had to open new offices, everything would be perfectly integrated.

Currently, we manage about 1,500 students as well as 180 teachers. In addition, there is administrative staff.

We are using it intensively at the moment because here, in the Peruvian system, if someone gets sick, the students and teacher in that classroom must go into lockdown for five days. That makes CYPHER Learning perfect for us.

We still have a long way to go to exploit all the resources that CYPHER Learning gives us. We know that it is a very extensive and powerful platform from which we have seen great benefit, but we can continue to explore and take much more advantage of it.

We have greatly appreciated the support we have received from the CYPHER Learning team. That has been vital for us. When we made the decision to work with CYPHER Learning, their staff was able to give us 24-hour assistance and, in four days, we had 85 percent of the school on the platform.

Positive

When it looked probable that the country would be affected by COVID and that we would not be able to have in-person classes, we first used Google Classroom and another platform. We then understood that we needed to have a professional platform.

We evaluated different platforms and we found that what CYPHER Learning offered was very interesting. The layout is very friendly and the tools are quite powerful. We also felt that there was a high level of support. For these reasons, we built our distance-learning system with CYPHER Learning.

The initial setup was easy, especially due to the support we received. In fact, when the lockdown came, we were making the decision to switch to CYPHER Learning but we had not yet registered our students. We were only at the stage of registering the lesson plans and the grading systems. They then suddenly announced that the lockdown was coming into effect in the next 24 hours. We had to register the students in bulk and we had difficulties transferring the CSV files. But with the help of CYPHER Learning's technical support, the problems were solved in a matter of two or three hours and, on the same day, we registered all our students in the system.

Overall, we had the system running in four days. Evidence of CYPHER Learning's versatility is in the fact that that was how long it took to have our school's entire educational system registered. It took us a total of seven days because we wanted to do internal tests, but that was proof, for me, of how flexible this solution is.

Once we created the environment, we had to integrate another school and this was done without any problems.

The deployment involved our head of technology, me as the director of studies, our three elementary and high school coordinators, and two support teachers who are strong in technology and academics.

Everything was done with the support of CYPHER Learning. We had some training which was admirable because, as we understood at that time, CYPHER Learning had a lot of pressure worldwide. We felt taken care of in every way.

We have also received communication from CYPHER Learning on the upgrades and developments.

CYPHER Learning is much more profitable. I know of other institutions that went with other solutions that took a long time to implement. With CYPHER Learning, I did not have to create layouts or environments and I did not have issues of organization or coordination. The management abilities CYPHER Learning provides allow you to quickly define grades, sections, groups of students, and to decide the layouts for each one. It is much easier.

For us, the return on investment was when the parents accepted the platform and recognized the work that was being done in the school during the lockdown. We did not experience a paralysis in education. We only had four days without classes, which was time we needed to refine the platform. When we started using CYPHER Learning, we had students working 100 percent. Some schools opted for synchronous teaching which is very tiring. We opted for mixed synchronous teaching and that helped prevent students from becoming tired, as well as their parents. The students could get the best out of themselves.

CYPHER Learning's price is good.

I don't think there are any other tools that could be better than the internal systems we have slowly and strategically built in CYPHER Learning. Before implementing, you have to be clear about your educational objectives and how your educational system operates internally. You need to have your pedagogical system organized. For an institution that is in the process of making changes, and looking for an opportunity to improve, this could be a very good opportunity.

What I have learned from using CYPHER Learning is that technology allows us to personalize and differentiate education much more. It helps us to achieve learning objectives more easily, when we use it well. It also provides great engagement for students with technology. High-achievers and students with difficulties are also better taken care of and given special attention.

Foreign Language: (Spanish)

¿Cuál es nuestra razón de uso principal?

Nuestra hipótesis de trabajo fue tener en mente la posibilidad de un evento en el que la escuela tuviera que cancelar las clases presenciales durante mucho tiempo debido al COVID. Necesitaríamos un sistema de educación en línea profesional. Lo abordamos como si nunca más fuéramos a optar por la educación presencial.

¿Cómo ha ayudado a mi organización?

Sentimos que mientras otras instituciones han sufrido un poco más los efectos de la pandemia, el hecho de que adoptamos y desarrollamos una plataforma que es muy profesional desde el principio y explotamos sus recursos al máximo, permitió que nuestra institución mantuviera un alto nivel de educación. Creemos que en las próximas evaluaciones nacionales de este año nuestra escuela continuará logrando resultados de primer lugar.

Hemos podido completar todo nuestro plan de estudios en línea en un año y medio. CYPHER Learning resolvió rápidamente el problema de tener un medio para impartir el plan de estudios. Hemos podido enfocarnos en medio de la pandemia en el bienestar de los estudiantes , en su salud emocional y el apoyo a los padres. El nivel de aprendizaje ha sido bastante alto y el nivel de control emocional de los alumnos es óptimo.

También sentimos que los estudiantes se sienten seguros. Algo que ha sido bastante sorprendente es el uso de la tecnología en los primeros grados con alumnos de seis años. Éramos un poco escépticos sobre el tema de la tecnología para estudiantes tan jóvenes. Pero con un poco de ayuda inicial de los padres, los estudiantes dominan el uso de la tecnología como cualquier otra herramienta, y se mueven con facilidad. El nivel de autonomía que pueden alcanzar los niños es impresionante.

Los estudiantes fluyen con la plataforma, ya que tiene un proceso de gamificación y estímulos. Se relaciona muy bien con la esencia del refuerzo positivo de la conducta y me permite reconocer el buen trabajo de los alumnos cuando se realiza a través de la plataforma. Y el trabajo sincrónico que realizan los estudiantes les permite ver objetivamente su propio nivel de desempeño. También son conscientes de ser reconocidos por sus profesores por su trabajo, y esto aumenta su compromiso con el programa.

El ambiente de aprendizaje gamificado nos permite crear espacios curriculares diferentes a los cursos tradicionales que tiene el currículo. Un profesor, por ejemplo, puede decidir crear un nuevo taller o curso de especialización para los estudiantes que estén interesados en un tema específico. El profesor simplemente abre el canal y registra a los estudiantes. Pueden elegir que alumnos de diferentes grados interactúen entre ellos compartiendo un curso o un taller, y esto es interesante y novedoso.

CYPHER Learning también me ha reducido significativamente el papeleo, así como la necesidad de imprimir. Hay menos gasto en suministros de papel y CYPHER Learning se complementa con otras herramientas que me permiten interactuar con los estudiantes de inmediato. Ha reducido los costos de impresión en aproximadamente un 60 por ciento.

Sobre todo, lo que ha hecho es dotar a nuestro equipo de más tiempo disponible para centrarse en los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje. Me podría ayudar a reducir personal, pero hemos preferido utilizar el tiempo que le ha liberado a nuestros profesores para reforzarlos en el área pedagógica. Así es como creemos que lograremos mejores resultados.

¿Qué es lo más valioso?

El primer punto es la facilidad de uso. Es una plataforma muy fácil de usar, especialmente para estudiantes y familias, con un diseño muy amigable.

También cuenta con una serie de sistemas de apoyo, entre los que se encuentran la comunicación con padres, alumnos, la posibilidad de facturar cursos online, y otras cualidades que hacen que el sistema sea muy versátil y facilite el trabajo del docente.

Tiene un buen nivel de integración con diferentes aplicaciones.

Este LMS también nos permite hacer "instrucción diferenciada". Es una herramienta muy efectiva para crear tácticas específicas que me permiten trabajar con alumnos avanzados y con alumnos que tienen dificultades de aprendizaje. De esta forma, cada alumno tiene un programa educativo enfocado a sus características personales. Gracias a esto, nuestra escuela tiene resultados excepcionalmente altos en las pruebas del Ministerio de Educación.

El aprendizaje adaptativo de CYPHER Learning ayuda a proporcionar a los estudiantes contenido óptimo y personalizado en función de sus objetivos y rendimiento. Me gusta mucho esta capacidad de adaptación al desarrollo de los alumnos. Es una característica contemporánea, que debe ser seguida como un importante proceso educativo. Está facilitando mucho nuestro trabajo.

Los informes son fundamentales. Han sido súper útiles para el seguimiento personal con los alumnos. El hecho de que el sistema me ayude a hacer un seguimiento de los alumnos en la entrega de trabajos y el logro de competencias permite que nuestro equipo educativo interactúe con los padres y los niños para los casos en que sea necesaria una ayuda especial y enfocada. Esto es muy valioso. Hemos notado en las pruebas internas que los estudiantes han logrado los requisitos educativos a través del sistema de educación a distancia y que están trabajando duro. En otras palabras, los estudiantes que experimentaron algún tipo de vacío están llenando ese vacío al usar esta plataforma.

El hecho de que los profesores puedan realizar un seguimiento del progreso de los estudiantes en función de las competencias a través de una cuadrícula de dominio hace que nuestro trabajo sea mucho más fácil. Los estudiantes son evaluados por sus competencias, lo cual es vital para nosotros. Se adapta muy bien a un sistema moderno de enseñanza y evaluación. La evaluación realizada con la plataforma responde a las demandas contemporáneas y le da a la escuela la oportunidad de aplicarlas.

Prácticamente nos da otro lenguaje para comunicarnos. Como director, me gusta reconocer a los alumnos cuando han logrado un buen resultado o han participado en un campeonato. A través de la plataforma CYPHER Learning, puedo enviarles mensajes y generalmente recibo una respuesta inmediata de los estudiantes. De esta manera, como director, puedo llegar rápidamente a muchas personas con un mensaje de aliento. Va junto con la promoción de un comportamiento positivo. Esto también incluye a los estudiantes que tienen dificultades. Si no fuera por CYPHER Learning, tendría que pasar por un proceso mucho más complejo para comunicarme con ellos.

CYPHER Learning ofrece una variedad de actividades para ayudar a involucrar a los estudiantes y desarrollar su independencia. Somos una sociedad tecnológica que utiliza la tecnología de forma intensiva. Introducir a los estudiantes en este sistema, comenzar a automatizar ciertos procesos de enseñanza y facilitar a los estudiantes el acceso a los recursos es algo muy relevante en el siglo XXI.

Además, las estrategias de intervención de la plataforma para los estudiantes, especialmente para aquellos que necesitan orientación, son una gran fortaleza de este LMS. El hecho de que la plataforma me permita crear mi propia línea de trabajo ayuda mucho y permite que los estudiantes logren resultados y sean reconocidos por el sistema por sus éxitos. Es una herramienta fabulosa. Subo los trabajos a las plataformas y los estudiantes reaccionan y trabajan rápidamente. Puedo atenderlo personalmente y ayudar a los estudiantes a avanzar en el contexto.

La capacidad de la solución para cerrar la diferencia de aprendizaje de los estudiantes es absolutamente un gran resultado y una gran ventaja. Cuando los estudiantes reciben retroalimentación rápida, siempre están ansiosos por sobresalir en sus estudios y avanzar. Primero se crean temas en los que aumenta el nivel de dificultad, después el alumno logra los resultados deseados, se siente feliz, avanza y el profesor puede reconocer estos logros rápidamente.

¿En qué necesita mejorar?

Me gustaría ver una mayor integración con algunos programas que no están integrados de forma nativa. Google es un estándar. Todo se integra con él. La integración con Google es una tarea clave.

Además, sería interesante que se integre con el Bachillerato Internacional. Hay una plataforma llamada ManageBac que tiene este tipo de integración. Si CYPHER Learning lo usara como referencia, aumentaría su funcionalidad y escalabilidad.

¿Por cuánto tiempo ha usado la solución?

Llevamos dos años y medio usando CYPHER Learning.

¿Qué piensa sobre la estabilidad de la solución?

Nunca hemos tenido problemas de estabilidad con CYPHER Learning. Cualquier tiempo de inactividad debido a actualizaciones siempre ha estado precedido por avisos, y el tiempo que la plataforma estuvo en modo de actualización fue bastante corto por lo que nunca ha sido un obstáculo.

¿Qué opino de la escalabilidad de la solución?

Cuando comenzamos a trabajar con CYPHER Learning, era usado solamente en una sede, pero escalamos rápidamente con CYPHER Learning para que se incorporará las tres sedes de nuestra institución. Hicimos ajustes para compartir dominios y el proceso de crecimiento fue perfecto. Si tuviéramos que abrir nuevas oficinas, todo estaría perfectamente integrado.

Actualmente, gestionamos alrededor de 1.500 estudiantes y 180 profesores. Además, hay personal administrativo.

Lo estamos usando de manera intensiva en este momento porque aquí, en el sistema peruano, si alguien se enferma, los estudiantes y el maestro de esa sala deben estar confinados durante cinco días. Eso hace que CYPHER Learning sea perfecto para nosotros.

Todavía nos queda mucho camino por recorrer para explotar todos los recursos que nos brinda CYPHER Learning. Sabemos que es una plataforma muy extensa y potente de la que hemos visto un gran beneficio, pero podemos seguir explorando y sacarle mucho más provecho.

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

Hemos apreciado mucho el apoyo que hemos recibido del equipo de CYPHER Learning. Eso ha sido vital para nosotros. Cuando tomamos la decisión de trabajar con CYPHER Learning, su personal pudo brindarnos asistencia las 24 horas. En solo cuatro días, teníamos el 85 por ciento de la escuela en la plataforma.

¿Cómo calificaría el servicio y soporte al cliente?

Positivo

¿Qué solución usé anteriormente y por qué cambié?

Cuando parecía probable que el país se vería afectado por el COVID y que no podríamos tener clases presenciales, primero usamos Google Classroom y otra plataforma. En ese momento entendimos que necesitábamos tener una plataforma profesional.

Evaluamos diferentes plataformas y descubrimos que lo que ofrecía CYPHER Learning era muy interesante. El diseño es muy amigable y las herramientas son bastante poderosas. También sentimos que hubo un alto nivel de apoyo. Por estas razones, construimos nuestro sistema de aprendizaje a distancia con CYPHER Learning.

¿Cómo fue la configuración inicial?

La configuración inicial fue fácil, especialmente debido al soporte que recibimos. De hecho, cuando llegó el confinamiento, justamente estábamos tomando la decisión de cambiar a CYPHER Learning pero aún no habíamos registrado a nuestros estudiantes. Estábamos solo en la etapa de registrar los planes de lecciones y los sistemas de calificación. De repente anunciaron sobre la confinación nacional que entraría en vigencia en las próximas 24 horas. Tuvimos que registrar a los estudiantes de forma masiva y tuvimos dificultades para transferir los archivos CSV. Pero con la ayuda del soporte técnico de CYPHER Learning, los problemas se solucionaron en cuestión de dos o tres horas y, en ese mismo día, registramos a todos nuestros alumnos en el sistema.

​​En general, tuvimos el sistema funcionando en cuatro días. La prueba de la versatilidad de CYPHER Learning es que ese fue el tiempo que tomó tener registrado todo el sistema educativo de nuestra escuela. Nos tomó un total de siete días porque queríamos hacer pruebas internas, pero esta fue la prueba, para mí, de qué tan flexible es esta plataforma.

Una vez que creamos el ambiente, tuvimos que integrar otra escuela y esto se hizo sin ningún problema.

El despliegue involucró a nuestro jefe de tecnología, a mi como director de estudios, nuestros tres coordinadores de primaria y secundaria y dos maestros de apoyo que controlan el área de la tecnología.

¿Y qué me puedes decir sobre el equipo de implementación?

Todo se hizo con el apoyo de CYPHER Learning. Tuvimos una formación que fue admirable porque, como entendíamos en ese momento, CYPHER Learning tenía mucha presión a nivel mundial. Nos sentimos atendidos en todos los sentidos.

También hemos recibido comunicación seguida de CYPHER Learning sobre las actualizaciones y desarrollos.

¿Cuál fue nuestro Retorno de Inversión?

CYPHER Learning es mucho más rentable. Sé de otras instituciones que optaron por otras soluciones que tardaron mucho en implementar. Con CYPHER Learning, no tuve que crear diseños o entornos y no tuve problemas de organización o coordinación. Las capacidades de gestión que proporciona CYPHER Learning te permiten definir rápidamente grados, secciones, grupos de alumnos y decidir la disposición de cada uno. Es mucho más fácil.

Para nosotros, el retorno de la inversión fue cuando los padres aceptaron la plataforma y reconocieron el trabajo que se estaba haciendo en la escuela durante el confinamiento. No experimentamos una parálisis en la educación. Solo tuvimos cuatro días sin clases, tiempo que necesitábamos para afinar la plataforma. Cuando comenzamos a usar CYPHER Learning, teníamos estudiantes trabajando al 100 por ciento. Algunas escuelas optaron por la enseñanza sincrónica que es muy agotadora. Nosotros optamos por la enseñanza síncrona mixta y eso ayudó a evitar que los alumnos se cansaran, al igual que sus padres. Los alumnos podían sacar lo mejor de sí mismos.

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

El precio de CYPHER Learning es bueno.

¿Qué otro consejo tengo?

No creo que haya otras herramientas que puedan ser mejores que los sistemas internos que hemos construido lenta y estratégicamente en CYPHER Learning. Antes de implementarlo, debe tener claro cuáles son sus objetivos educativos y cómo funciona internamente su sistema educativo. Necesitas tener tu sistema pedagógico organizado. Para una institución que está en proceso de cambios y buscando una oportunidad de mejora, esta podría ser una muy buena oportunidad.

Lo que he aprendido usando CYPHER Learning es que la tecnología nos permite personalizar y diferenciar mucho más la educación. Nos ayuda a lograr los objetivos de aprendizaje más fácil cuando lo usamos de forma correcta. También proporciona un gran compromiso para los estudiantes con la tecnología. Tanto los alumnos de alto rendimiento como los estudiantes con dificultades están mejor atendidos y reciben una atención especial.

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.