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.

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.

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.