CYPHER Learning Reviews

We used to have a traditional education system before the pandemic, but because of the pandemic, we had to reach students in a different way. That was when we engaged CYPHER Learning as a platform to help us continue our teaching and learning processes. Thanks to this platform, the students continued their education.

With CYPHER Learning's automation, students are aware of what they are going to do. They see the assignments and their achievements and they know their own grades. In other words, they regulate their learning pace by themselves.

For us as teachers, the adaptive learning has allowed us to make decisions regarding the progress of students, including their achievements and skills. This helps regulate the progress of the semester.

The solution’s competency-based learning helps us understand what percentage of the activities the student has exploited among those that the teacher has uploaded to the platform. This information allows us to understand a lot about the interaction that teachers have with students.

Lately, we are focusing on formative evaluation, which is an evaluation of the process through which the student acquires the skills and we receive feedback regarding the student’s situation. The ability to tag classes and assignments with competencies is very good because in our country we work under a system based on competencies and formative evaluation. The fact that teachers can attach competencies and qualification scales to the activities that they program in their rubrics, helps indicate development and reinforce our teaching style.

And thanks to the formative evaluation that CYPHER Learning has provided us with, students now know why they have been qualified in certain criteria. The data is in front of them.

Each teacher who designs a course takes into account the skills and recommendations that students have to meet. Each activity is designed based on the competencies record. The student must be aware of what he is going to learn, so this tool is very important.

It helps students develop their independence. Little by little, the teachers are learning that the students want autonomy and independence in each activity.
It is a sequence that all teachers manage. And the students already understand that the platform has the instructions they need and helps them regulate autonomy and time management.

The platform has given us a space to manage things in an organized manner with consistent dynamics. If it were not for CYPHER Learning, everyone would look for their own learning platform.

And when it comes to intervention strategies for students, it helps save time because tools such as direct messaging enable providing feedback to students who are having difficulties. Teachers can redirect the activity or their explanations and that helps facilitate the learning process. Not all students quickly understand the message. The way CYPHER Learning messages work facilitates interaction between the teacher and the student.

When it comes to administrative and bureaucratic work, a teacher makes his class and uploads it to CYPHER Learning. The advisor supervises the class and gives feedback on his behalf, which makes the process easier. We are still learning about CYPHER Learning's dynamic environment, but we have saved about 70 percent in time on administrative work.

Another advantage of CYPHER Learning, because it supports a good amount of data, is that we can avoid the use of physical textbooks. Before we implemented CYPHER Learning, school accessories cost parents 1,500 soles. Now, the cost is 500 or 800 soles because there is no need to buy books.

Other benefits include the fact that the communication with students is through a single platform. All students are aware of the importance of the use of CYPHER Learning for hybrid and face-to-face classes. And through the supervision and monitoring of teachers through the platform, the advisor in each area can investigate what the teacher's work is like.

It has definitely helped our school a lot. It is a very powerful LMS.

This platform not only allows you to transmit the content in an agile and interactive way, but you can also interact with the students and keep them up to date. It is a platform that provides communication with the student, not only academically but also personally.

It's very easy for educators to communicate with students. It's part of the school's "DNA." CYPHER Learning is our only platform for contact with students. We have another platform but it is more for announcements and institutional issues. CYPHER Learning is the meeting space between teachers and students. It’s the main provider of content, evaluations, structure, and design of classes.

The tool that we use the most is personalizing the content with the students and doing inverted learning. As a teacher, I upload my material to the platform with all the detailed activities, links, and feedback. I use it more than anything to plan my classes, and so that the students know the objective of the class and achieve it.

And the solution's automation for helping show or hide specific class sections or assignments is very good. It is a very transparent and intuitive platform with various tools to help students.

Also, the ability of teachers to track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid is very important. All teachers have to manage and take advantage of the information they receive from CYPHER Learning. The more automated CYPHER Learning is in terms of achievements, the more the information will be useful for the teacher when continuing to design classes, giving feedback to the students, and continuing with formative assessment.

It is also important that CYPHER Learning has a link with other platforms such as Zoom, AMCO, et cetera. The ability that it has to connect with other tools that help enrich the teaching and learning process is great. Many teachers use various gamified processes to teach their classes, such as video, a song, or a canvas.

Perhaps there could be advances in artificial intelligence with more precise and immediate automated reports so that teachers have reports at hand. That would make things easier and would speed up processes.

We are a private school in Lima and we have been using CYPHER Learning since 2021.

The stability of this solution is excellent. It has enabled virtual, blended, hybrid, and face-to-face education, in an optimal way. In our almost three years of use, there have only been two or three network drops. That is not an alarming amount, and with CYPHER Learning we get immediate feedback and support.

We do not know 100 percent of CYPHER Learning yet. We continue training teachers in its use and exploitation, but we see that CYPHER Learning is evolving even more to provide us with more tools. Our goal at the moment is that CYPHER Learning will meet a national standard and become an official system of evaluation, according to the Peruvian rating system. We have high expectations that CYPHER Learning will continue to respond to all our needs.

We are empowering teachers more and more in the use of the platform. Students receive all content through CYPHER Learning. Our goal is to reach the parents of the students more and involve them more in the platform. We have plans to increase the use of CYPHER Learning with the families of students. They still don't understand exactly what CYPHER Learning is.

And as a network of various Franciscan schools, we also want our other schools to be able to access this platform.

We have approximately 140 users: teachers, assistants, advisory teachers who are the monitors, and our deputy directors. It has allowed us to increase staff. Student and parent users add many more to that count.

The technical support is quite agile. The school's systems team has constant communication with CYPHER Learning. In fact, at first, we didn't use their support that much, but CYPHER LEARNING has opened the channels of communication between the school and its technical support team and that has been very beneficial for us.

Their support is getting better and better. We are only now beginning to get to know the representatives.

There is a Peruvian platform called SieWeb that we used to communicate with students, but it did not have the CYPHER Learning's agility to interact with students.

We learned about CYPHER Learning due to the pandemic. It is an LMS platform and SieWeb is not. It has completely different capabilities in terms of uploading content, design, interaction, training, work, et cetera.

It did not take us long. We looked at other institutions that already had the platform and we quickly became familiar with it. The platform is very intuitive, and our objective is to learn and exploit it much more.

Setting up the design and the user interface took us a month. The pandemic began on March 12 and, two weeks later, we returned to classes. At the beginning of the pandemic, each one of us went for various virtual spaces, but it was quickly decided to implement CYPHER Learning. The part that took the longest was the uploading of data.

At first, we trained the teachers, students, and their families too. We created tutorials and guidelines for teachers on how to use the platform so that all the teachers could handle things in the same way.

We hired a consultant who had experience with CYPHER Learning at another institution. The system engineers (tech team) helped in the development of tutorials and explained how to access the platform and use it. We had a good experience with the consultant. He arrived at the time we needed him most.

He presented us with different proposals on how to design our LMS environment and we adapted it to our objectives.

In terms of staff involved in addition to the consultant, there were the three systems engineers and a quality coordinator.

The return on investment is in CYPHER Learning's ability to adapt to different educational service modalities, save paper costs, enable student interaction with other virtual environments, monitor the work of teachers on the platform, and much more.

We thought about Google Classroom as, in the beginning, several teachers opted for that platform, but it seemed to us that CYPHER Learning would be a unifying space. It has the versatility to link to other tools. And its evaluation system, rubrics, feedback features, and instant messaging are things that CYPHER Learning handles really well.

We have been using this platform for almost three years and we are exploring it a bit more every day. We still haven't mastered all of the tools it has to offer. Students usually say that use of the platform is very practical and functional.

We did a survey in the school and a large percentage of our teachers access CYPHER Learning daily, between two and three times, which means that the use of CYPHER Learning is very beneficial and helps us save a great deal of time. We have also evaluated it with families through surveys and the satisfaction is high.

CYPHER Learning has all the functionality to keep students at the same level, but it is the teacher's duty to make the most of those features. Logically, not all students are at the same level, but if the teacher uses 100 percent of CYPHER Learning's functionalities, students can achieve a very balanced learning pace.

If you want a space that allows you to work on skills, formative evaluation, the interaction between teachers and students, and that gives you the ability to reinforce learning, CYPHER Learning is a very good tool. It can be customized according to the needs of your organization.

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 three different programs of varying sizes. For example, one of our programs currently has 2,500 students. Another has about 1,200. So, we use it for varying programs that vary from anywhere from nine months to two years.

It brings students together in one place with teaching materials. Also, it has a social capability to it by way of forums and groups. That is definitely important for our programs. There has been a lot of engagement in our programs.

It is extremely important that dates and times are exact when we follow up with students, as it keeps our students on track.

For as long as I have been working with MATRIX (for a few years now), they have the social aspect with groups. The thing that they did not have for years, until earlier this year, was a reply-all feature. I had been asking for that for years and they finally added it this year. That has been helpful because now our students are less frustrated.

We can see who has accessed the portal, but it is not very intuitive. There is an issue with MATRIX user reporting. It is not that useful a lot of the time because we see conflicting dates in the activity and login. I have tried to work with their engineers, and asked, "Well, what's the real deal here," and there is no clarity around it. However, we can tell when people have last logged in.

The user reporting is a mess. It is unclear what I will get from this report. You need to keep tweaking and trying different options in the reports, then you don't know what you will get until you run the report. That is time-consuming and unclear to the user.

The calendar system could be greatly improved. I understand MATRIX is progressing in many ways by way of focusing on integrations with other apps and the whole API world. However, it would be nice if they could revisit their basics, e.g., the calendar system and user reporting, and get those basic things that people use every day to be accurate. 

I have been using it since December 2019, which has been pretty much two years now.

On the whole, it is pretty stable, but there have been issues that keep creeping up. I have been reporting them for years, getting temporary solutions. I don't know if they are running updates on their end, but the previous solution will then fall apart. I have to report it again and they have to fix it again. This all has to do with their basics, as far as reporting and calendars.

The technical support is 50-50. You don't know what you are going to get. Sometimes they will resolve it or help you resolve it, then other times you get an answer from someone who says, "It is not capable of doing that." Then, the next day, you might get a response from another technician who says, "Oh, I am sorry. Our system actually does this quite often."

They are hands-off by way of saying, "Oh, we are unable to replicate this." This is even when I am showing them video and screenshot proof of what is happening. Quite often, they say, "Oh, we are not able to replicate this." Then, that is it. They don't really help beyond that.

I would rate the technical support as six out of 10.

Neutral

We didn't previously use another solution.

We do cycles with our programs, but I am involved in every setup.

The initial setup is straightforward in some ways. I have a background in LMS development so it is easy to set up and straightforward in that way. Some of it is not straightforward because some of the options are by way of setting up your site. They are not very clear about what they do. Or, some options are just thrown here and there in the settings. It seems not completely organized. It is like, "Well, where should we put this? Let's just put this here." Even though it doesn't quite make sense there, there isn't a lot of flexibility in terms of customizing things in MATRIX. 

Deployment time varies per program. We try to allow a lot of space for QA testing and other things. It takes about a month to deploy, but that is not necessarily eight hours a day, five days a week. I am saying a month for internal user testing. Since our programs are very extensive with a lot of materials, it does take time to set them up.

We just purchased this solution from the vendor, then it was built in-house.

There is a team for deployment and maintenance because we have so many students across a few programs. There are at least 10 people. That varies from people getting into the weeds of building the courses, working on the back-end, or just administering it.

We extensively use it since we use it to deploy our biggest selling courses or programs. It is used year-round and daily by students, and by us as well. We actually want to look at other systems or develop our own system because the cost point of MATRIX is so high. It doesn't feel like we get any value for it.

Take your time and test it out. Forecast how many users you will have. Are they going to be able to keep up with the high cost per user? I would definitely tell them to really dive in and forecast growth. See if you can keep up with this budgetary-wise.

I really want to work with our VP of technology and see about developing our own system so we can move away from MATRIX and save on profit.

I would rate this solution as seven out of 10.