CYPHER Learning Reviews

We offer transformative health programs. We offer self-paced and cohort-based learning experiences online for health and wellness.

We are using its latest version.

CYPHER Learning is extraordinarily intuitive. It allows us to customize the design and the look-and-feel of all of our pages inside of a course. 

It also allows us to direct students automatically from one task to the next, including creating their own reflections and personal goals. So, it really does support student agency, as we call it, as well as student success in completing tasks on their own.

We are able to see who has not accessed the portal and follow up with those people. It is important for us because retention is one of the factors in evaluating the efficacy of a course.

It enables us to monitor and check student progress. We don't use the mastery tool so much, but we do use the gamification tool where they get a set of scores or points once they complete something, and that badging system helps us track the completion. We've steered away from the grading tool and stuck with more of what I always call the rewards.

We love a couple of things. We love the group feature allowing students to have peer-to-peer learning experiences. In our case, it is for students, but this feature could also be useful for a business to provide peer-to-peer learning experiences for employees. The group tool provides an opportunity for students to connect with their peers inside of their own digital space. One of the aspects that we love about the group tool is that it allows students to leave the course but engage in a digital space where they access materials that are personalized to their group.

We also like gamification. It allowed us to give our users scores and have a friendly competition to motivate their learning success.

Another great feature is that it allows you to change the naming conventions of the tools. I've never seen an LMS that allows you to do that. All organizations have their own vocabulary, and this is just an extraordinary feature that gives you so much freedom to customize the platform to align with your organization's look-and-feel and vocabulary. 

Their Support Forum was exemplary. I got answers within 25 minutes of my questions, and they were personalized to me, which made the Support Forum highly valuable. I love the fact other people could see the question and the answer I got, and I could see theirs.

I'm an instructional designer, so from a designer standpoint, it is important to have a user-friendly resource folder that allows us to organize our artifacts for easy access to pull into multiple pages and modules. The second feature that I need is an easier capacity to edit pages with images and customizable headings. 

I started in November of 2019.

It is highly stable.

It is absolutely scalable. Currently, we have 10 courses, and we could easily go way more.

In terms of its users, we have a curriculum director who oversees content quality, and then we have course builders. Sometimes, the curriculum director takes on the course builder role, which means aligning the content into a cohesive format in CYPHER Learning. We have an admissions director who looks at the analytics to help us look at retention and other continuity needs.

In terms of its usage, we're currently in a little bit of a holding pattern. We've done an initial launch, and we're now assessing and bringing on more content experts. So, we're back in what we call build mode with a plan to launch in the fall another set of courses.

Their Support Forum is fantastic. The initial onboarding was easy with great technical support and relationship building with Alexia. I got a chance to get to know her really well because she's a designer. If I didn't get what I needed at the Support Forum, I could reach out to her directly. I would rate their support a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I am an instructional designer. So, I work with lots of learning management systems, but in particular, for this project, I didn't work with any other solution.

It was straightforward. The company provided us with excellent onboarding training.

The build took a long time, but that was not because of CYPHER Learning. I could probably build a full course in a week if I had all the content with me. 

We implemented it on our own. In terms of maintenance, the curriculum director and the course builder both tag team to support the technical ends. They also need to communicate with the content experts of the courses to manage student expectations and technical needs. We had to set up a Google email account to make sure students had a place to get help.

We absolutely will see an ROI when we launch.

Their plans are based on enrollment numbers. We're at the silver level with 100 active learners. So, you're really beholden to how many learners you're going to accommodate. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I evaluated Thinkific, but it was nowhere near the level of features and customization that we needed.

Maybe I'm being biased, but you definitely want to hire or have a course designer with the skills of course design and the understanding of how to leverage all the features that are available in an an LMS. The other piece of advice is to be very thoughtful and intentional about your initial setup by asking how it aligns with your goals and outcomes.  For example, we needed to think about the naming conventions of each feature to match our organization. So, instead of calling them courses, we called them journeys. Instead of calling them groups, we called them communities.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to collaborate and work as a team to build the platform, and iterate, iterate, iterate.

We connect it to HubSpot, which is for our tracking of marketing, but in CYPHER Learning, we haven't done a lot of automation. We also haven't used the competency-based learning feature. We're very new, and we do intend to use it, but we aren't there yet. We do use gamification and badging. 

I would rate CYPHER Learning a nine out of ten.

Since we came from a previous LMS provider, pre-pandemic, primarily the use case was just for compliant courses. Every year, we require employees to take these courses as we are an insurance company.

We're heavily regulated here in the Philippines. We need to comply with certain regulations, and courses like anti-money laundering, data privacy, et cetera. On an annual basis, we have almost ten compliance courses that all of our employees need to complete.

We were not happy with the previous providers, so we started looking and we found this. Pre-pandemic, the plan was really just for compliance courses. Then, the pandemic happened and it was good that we started with CYPHER LEARNING which we actually launched right in April, about a month after the lockdown here in the Philippines.

The moment that we launched it, we launched it with a few compliance courses. However, the moment that we launched it, my manager told me we now need to start looking at how we'd be able to maximize all of the features to offer self-learning-based courses or virtual classes. That's how we've been using it.

We house all of our training materials in what we call a Campus, and that's something that I have also loved. We're able to create our own brand. It's where we upload all of our training materials. About two-thirds of the population of the organization is composed of salespeople deployed all over the Philippines. If they need to review products or policies or anything like that, we just tell them, "Oh, it's all on Campus. Go and check it out."

The effect on our service delivery is good. Primarily we service the sales team. They would come knocking on our doors, asking for training, and lately, especially last year when we've put several courses that are not necessarily compliance courses into the platform, we've been getting fewer and fewer requests for training. Initially, we thought that they didn't need us anymore, and when we checked with the head of sales, we got a report that before they actually ask us, they were advised to go and check Campus first. If it's there, they don't need to bother the training team.

There are several things that I like about the product. Although this is not something that is held by the learner, from an administration perspective, the fact that you can brand it all to your liking and the fact that people actually do not know that it's provided by a different company, is important. They thought that it was developed internally due to the fact that it would also have our color schemes, the fonts, and the logo. Our URL would not have CYPHER LEARNING in the address.

We also like the groups. People are able to be assigned to a group, whether it be a learning group or an interest group, and they can just get in there and have an open discussion freely.

Something that we also started using, but have yet to fully leverage is gamification. We really want to maximize it in our organization. We divide all of our employees into four distinct groups. These are engagement groups. We wanted them to somehow have a way to collaborate, and compete. At the end of the year, we can assign points or badges to them, and then they can get as many badges as they can. At the end of the year, they can win something for the entire team.

Although it's not directly through the portal, on a weekly basis, especially if there are active compliance courses, I'm required by the executive committee to submit a weekly report that shows who has not accessed the portal. When I do that, I can send an email to those that haven’t and follow up with them.

The reports are also something that's very helpful from an administrative perspective.

It’s very important that we follow up with those who haven't accessed the correct courses or the portal in general as it's a regulatory requirement. We need to chase people to have them complete what they need to do in a certain period of time. It's primarily from a compliance perspective that we're doing on a weekly basis. It's something increasing with traffic so that people are able to learn by themselves using the portal. That's something that will be prioritized by the incoming learning management. During the pandemic, that's what we wanted to promote, that we don't want them to come to us. The course that they're looking for is actually already available on the platform.

Initially, we only focused on sales capabilities, including training them on products and on how to sell products. However, starting last year, we also migrated all of our leadership development and people development courses. That's something for the sales training team, as well as for HR corporate training. That's also where we saw some improvements as far as where traffic is concerned.

In terms of efficiencies directly impacting operations, it’s not so much of an effect due to the portal being used primarily for skill-building, whether it's sales or leadership skills-building.

We do have a solutions competency feature. That's actually part of my KPI this year and next week I have a meeting with HR to see how we'd be able to maximize the mastery feature and link the competencies with the mastery to each of the courses. That is something that will be done this year.

The solution allows us to enable monitoring and check students in a very efficient way. I don't experience any trouble generating reports. After I've downloaded the raw file, it takes me about an hour to fix it for the purpose of submitting it to the executive committee.

It helped reduce our administrative costs in delivering training materials. Without the LMS, without Campus, people would ask for our training materials, which we're really not comfortable sharing. However, we don't have a choice as we don't have a place where we put these materials. We now have Campus. It's neatly organized. They can always just go back to Campus and review the things that they've seen.

When looking at the time and costs associated with delivering the training material, we’ve seen some savings. However, I really can't put a value on that. What we're doing now is training through MS Teams. It’s coupled with Campus since that's what we use for blended learning. We no longer have to travel. All of our salespeople are scattered all over the Philippines. Before the pandemic and before the LMS, when we trained people in different cities in the Philippines, we needed to travel there. Now, since we're doing everything virtually through primarily MS teams and Campus, we’ve saved a lot, although I'm not necessarily sure exactly how much. It’s a lot, it's really huge.

At any given time, we had four trainers who would go around the Philippines and we had about 300 salespeople who also needed to travel to the focus city where the training was. We’ve saved on the travel costs of about 300 people.

I do wish that there could be some formatting option so that I don't have to do some manual work in terms of translating the data into, for example, a PowerPoint presentation. However, each company would have its own way of reporting. That's why CYPHER LEARNING settled with Excel, the CSV file. Although I do know that there is an HTML version for the report. When I looked at it, it was not something that would meet the requirements of the senior leaders. I simply settled for doing manual work. Again, it just takes me about an hour, so that's not really a problem.

Something that was put on the back burner due to the cost was the ability to also access external learning portals, memberships, and subscriptions through CYPHER LEARNING. For example, if you have LinkedIn Learning or Udemy, you can already do that. When I told management about that, they said that's a nice feature, however, we would need to first provide subscriptions to all of the employees so that we would have that connection between Campus, the LMS, and the external learning provider. We haven't really used that, however, if we did, that would have been really great as we don't need to rely on internally produced materials since there is a lot of wealth of resources already out there. For now, we're developing our own materials, due to cost implications.

It wasn't made clear to us how to properly set it up. That's why we ended up with one organization for the entire company. Later on, a year into using Campus, we realized that "organization" can actually represent the different departments inside the company. Right now, I’m coordinating with the tech team on how to smoothly transition to that as there are also reporting and administrative access features. It would be great if the position of the department head would be able to directly monitor the completion of his teams and his own people. We can only do that if the organization is divided into different departments.

Adding packages would be an improvement. They should offer something like bronze, silver, and different packages, and could already include automatic subscriptions to these external learning platforms as well so that it's just a one-time payment to just one company instead of getting a subscription externally and linking it to CYPHER LEARNING.

There's one thing that I've been trying to see if it is doable. We're looking at individual development plans for each employee, something that would be easy to align with what we want to do. Right now, we have a separate way of doing individual development plans for each employee. What we would really love for Campus to be able to do is help us in that area. If we feel that this person is lacking in an area, there should be an employee development feature on the portal which could be set up as a way for managers to actively manage that on behalf of the employee.

I've been using the solution since early 2020, right before the pandemic.

The stability is great. We haven't had any downtime. The only issue that we've had so far is not necessarily related to the system or the platform. It's mainly the internet connection. The internet connection here in the Philippines is rather unstable. When people do complain about them not being able to continue with the course, that it's not budging or it's just buffering, we tell them, "I tested the course on my end and if it works, then automatically that means it's the internet problem." So far, the internet connection is the only problem we've had. We've never had any downtimes or any major issues with it.

Our business is expanding. Since the business is expanding, we are potentially growing two or threefold and we're hiring people that are not necessarily employees, they're third-party vendors or partners. Salespeople are also franchisees. Just yesterday I told my manager that maybe we can look into eCommerce to give access to the third-party sellers to access Campus, and also somehow learn in the process so that we can manage the headcount as I think we're only paying for five hundred people as part of our plan. We don't have any plans of extending it to the entire population of about one thousand who will come in. We're looking into also doing the eCommerce option.

Customer service is really great. When I ask a question, it would not take a day before I get an answer. Sometimes I get an answer about 30 minutes or an hour after I post the question.

My favorite part is that they assist you very well. DPOs are huge here in the Philippines. I came from a customer service environment and I’ve learned how I would want to be served as a customer. Not only do they answer the question professionally, but they also educate you as to where you can find the information or learn more about the process and anticipate what else you need. Unlike other people who would just answer your question directly and that's it, they really go the extra mile.

Positive

We switched from a different platform.

It was cumbersome and not intuitive. Although we could also brand it, we couldn't do so much with it. It didn't look like it was from the Twenty-first century. CYPHER Learning is very modern-looking, on the other hand. You have the left panel and it's easy to navigate. 

The initial setup was straightforward. In fact, part of the package was a learning session. We did go through that, however, it's focused mainly on creating courses, creating reports, involving people, et cetera. We missed that part about the organization being chopped into different departments.

We signed the contract in December 2019, and we immediately started working with the team here in Manila. We launched it in April 2020 and that's only due to the fact that we had to develop the materials for about a month, however, I'd say that in about three months, we would've been already ready if we already had the material. It took us about three months to get used to the entire system.

We did look at other options. As a requirement in the organization, we needed to look at at least three options and we need to convince the senior leaders as to why we're recommending CYPHER LEARNING. We were looking at two other providers, however, I'm not privy to the other two as I came on board when the contract was already signed.

The solution is cloud-based. We access it through the browser, and it is my understanding that it's in the cloud.

I handle a team, and part of that team is one person who is the administrator and the content developer for LMS. Unfortunately, she left last year. Looking into the solutions rule engine was part of something that I told her to do. Therefore, we haven't fully maximized the rules engine. I'm currently hiring an e-learning manager, so that's something that will be on top of her task list.

I'd advise potential users not to be afraid to test out all the features. There are things that we never thought we would be able to do. Things that we were told were there were not exciting for us in the first place, however, the moment I tried to test it out during my free time, I would tell my manager and he would just tell me, "Okay. Go and try it out and see how the learners would react and if they liked it. Let's make it BAU as part of the process." That's why, this year, we're already looking at all these other features. My suggestion is don't be afraid to play around with it, especially the ability to sell the training program.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The only feature missing that I've heard of is not lacking in the LMS. There's a Learning Experience, LXP. By default, the plans that they provide already include subscriptions to external learning platforms. That means a company does not have to create its own materials. They can trust that learners or employees would be really hungry to learn. Since it's linked to external learning providers, it's easy to provide all the resources to them without even creating your own. The only thing that you need to create in an LXP platform would be compliance courses, which are unique to every company.

CYPHER Learning was especially helpful during the pandemic. All of the features were useful including creating and evaluating assignments, creating classes, creating child classes, badges, gamification, and more.

We are always doing training sessions, and whenever we think to use different features, such as the Portfolio, we include them in our training sessions. For instance, we do a training session for teachers before the school year starts. Then, if there are requests for retraining in the middle of the school year, we try to put those interested into the program.

We provide our users with content and basic tools through the CYPHER Learning Help Center. There is an icon in the system that leads to their help desk, and this is what we ask our teachers to use, especially during the training sessions. If they have issues or concerns about using any of the features that CYPHER Learning offers, we try to emphasize the use of the help icon to resolve them.

The most valuable feature is the ability for us to create personalized lessons. This is better suited to our students and learners than offering content or a subject that is already built into the system. This is one of the main things that I am looking for in an LMS.

When we create personalized classes, the concept of a child class is important. This is because we have our basic education but each course has several sections. In CYPHER Learning, a good feature is that we can create a child class based on a parent class. We don't need to create a new class and then upload new lessons or assignments.

When we create assignments and give them to the students, the system checks the answers based on the input made by the teachers.

The user interface makes the platform easy to use and manage.

We recently had a conversation with their team to discuss some of the changes that we wanted to see in the product.

There are some analytics issues that need to be resolved, including the item analysis.

We have had problems with synching some of the lessons.

The grading system itself is something that we discussed with them because it's not well-adapted in our use case. The list of students needs to be organized according to gender. The list of students in the product contains both male and female students, whereas, in our grading system, we list the male students followed by the female students.

The grade book needs to be improved because that is one of the most valuable features. It's how we assess our students.

The assessment tools should also be improved. It would be helpful if it could be set up in such a way that the students will be able to take an online exam. This will help to develop their higher-order thinking skills.

Perhaps they can integrate the course evaluations.

We have been using CYPHER Learning for more than two years.

CYPHER Learning is a stable platform. They provide their system maintenance notice ahead of time and for us, it means that we are able to announce it to the organization or to the institution ahead of time.

CYPHER Learning is committed to the stability of the system.

We are deployed across multiple locations. This school year, we have basic education from kindergarten through grade 12. We also have two college campuses with different departments, and this is in two different cities.

We have a total of 719 faculty, which are composed of teachers and other employees. We have a total of 15,316 students that also use the solution.

In our organization, some of the faculty are also enrolled in postgraduate study. They are able to use an exemption in this case and use their teacher's account.

Another aspect of scalability is upgrading. Specifically, we are able to level up. We were originally just using the basic features but now we are upgrading our horizons. We are including features such as portfolio, assignment, and other assessment tools. We did not stop growing after the first year.

We were also able to integrate other applications, such as Google Meet. We would like to use Zoom but Google Meet is the most convenient for us.

We are working toward using the Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELCs) next. Essentially, we didn't stop with what we had learned during the first two years. We are leveling up. Whatever products or features are being proposed or posted in the product news, we are trying to use them.

Their support is available 24/5 and they are excellent. They're very responsive.

They also have a support tracking system that shows the progress with respect to resolving an issue.

Overall, I would rate the support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We did a simple evaluation but otherwise, we did not use another LMS solution.

I was involved in the initial setup, but the majority of it was handled by our IT department. For the first year after our implementation, things were good. We did not experience challenges during the initial setup or immediately afterward.

Our implementation was done in stages, and training began with the core group. As a part of the core group, my training session was conducted by the CYPHER Learning team in the Philippines. After that, training was done for teachers in select groups. Not all of them were completed during the first year.

We selected different groups such as basic education from grade five to senior high, as well as selected courses in the colleges or in the bachelor's degree. Then, we also had postgraduate study. All of the teachers for these groups were trained during the first year.

During the first year, we also leveled up our training. We went from basic training to level two training, or perhaps intermediate training. The following year, we added courses and grade levels.

The next groups to be added were grades three and four. For the college courses, we added all of them. In fact, all of the higher education was added during the second year of our implementation.

From that point, our teachers have a training session before the school year starts, and we regularly upgrade the faculty members on the use of the system.

For our students, we create tutorial videos. These are particularly helpful for new students and transfers. We want them to be able to easily use the system.

Finally, as part of this process, we conduct training sessions specifically for newly hired teacher personnel. This is done in coordination with the HR department and with the approval of our vice president of academic affairs.

We have our IT specialist, who is also part of the team.

We have a team of five people that are responsible for maintenance, each of whom has their own role. We create accounts for teachers and students. We are also involved in creating training sessions, reactivation of archived accounts, and technical support.

If it is not a serious issue, we handle the technical support. However, if it is required at a higher level, then teachers are referred to consult the help icon.

The members of the team have their own regions. There is one for each of the two cities and three for higher education. Our IT technician is in addition to these five that maintain it. As we expand the use of our system, we expect this to increase as well. Also, as we continue to build, we are expanding our horizons.

For example, we are tapping the teachers and faculty members that we know are well-versed in the use of CYPHER Learning. For each of the five of us in the team, we are tapping perhaps two or three more per organization. In my case, with basic education, I have two from the elementary department and two from senior high. Then, from other colleges, I think there are two or more included in our team.

As an LMS coordinator, I cannot guarantee that we have seen ROI. However, my feeling from using the system is that we are getting a return on our investment.

We currently have a two-year contract with the vendor.

We have compared pricing with different vendors and found that CYPHER Learning was the most reasonable. It is not the most expensive platform of its type but it has a lot of good features, which is the most valuable thing for me. It gives us what is most useful for online teaching.

There are no additional costs for CYPHER Learning itself. However, we had an extra product that was built into the platform, and there was an additional charge for this.

Some of us worked with Moodle to assess it, although it was not used for a large number of students. In my case, I used Moodle for three sections just to do a dry run. However, I was not able to get value from it because I didn't find it to be a user-friendly platform. That's why we had to move to another LMS.

Our administration regularly looks into other learning platforms, although we are currently locked into a two-year contract so I don't expect that we will change solutions.

The first year after we implemented this solution was good. Our faculty members and students were excited to use the system. However, as the years have gone by, there have been problems or challenges that have arisen.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that they have a good design layout, and they have features such as course export, wherein we are allowed to export into different formats. This is something that is needed by the teachers. The e-portfolio is also good. Generally speaking, I recommend CYPHER Learning because there are components that have proven to be useful in managing activities, especially nowadays that we are in an online teaching, flexible learning delivery model.

Compared to other platforms, it is easy to use, manage, and navigate the interface. You do not necessarily need a tutor or training to learn to use it. It is convenient for the purpose of conducting assessments and using other tools. It helps to convey lessons and give information for both students and teachers, whether the sessions are synchronous or asynchronous.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that you should never stop learning. Don't stop exploring CYPHER Learning because otherwise, you'll depend on what has been taught during the training. You won't explore their new products and you will be left behind. If there are new products or features released, you should try them for yourself. If you find that they are productive and useful, then include them in future training sessions.

Most of our staff are grateful to have CYPHER Learning as our learning management system. There are still some features that we haven't used, including the portfolio and the grade book. We may look into the portfolio, as they have already enlightened us on how to use it to empower our work.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.