CYPHER Learning Reviews

We use CYPHER Learning as our learning management system, our LMS. Our training courses are housed there, and that is how we do our reporting. 

We also use it alongside an external content creation tool called Articulate 360. We create content in Articulate 360, and then through the SCORM packaging, we put that on CYPHER Learning as well. So, we use the material that CYPHER created for us, and we also use third-party content that we put on there.

We are a wound care company. Our company has been around for 30 years, but prior to a year ago, when I started, they did not have a trainer like me. They did not have somebody heading the training department. They were a small company with 150 people working. It was a very small organization in terms of number of employees. They did not have the need to have something like this. There was only a revenue cycle department and a handful of clinicians out in the field at the nursing homes. Our business is wound care at long-term facilities, nursing homes, wound care clinics, and things like that. People who go in are basically on Medicare Part B. That was our main business, and we grew exponentially over the last 12 months. Those 150 employees have now turned into 800 in a year. We have opened up several different arms of our business. We do not just have nursing homes; we also manufacture our own goods. We also started a direct delivery department, which is like a mini Amazon. We have warehouses strategically placed around the country so that they are not more than 24 hours away from a facility to deliver. With CYPHER Learning, we have been able to create different organizations depending on who the person is, where they work, and what their skill sets are. We have different departments, so they are going to have different skill sets and different training needs. We were able to create these different organizations, and depending on their role, we have been able to easily create courses and then put them in their little pockets of where they work. When they go into the catalog, they can see the relevant courses that they need to take. It has been easy for that.

We are also doing a big push on leadership. We created a Leadership Academy, and a nice thing about CYPHER Learning is that it has allowed me to create paths or a package of courses within a course. The Leadership Academy has 14 courses within that one course. A nice thing is that it tells you the competencies based on the material. That is something I never had before, and I have been doing this for years. It is just amazing how it tells you how many competencies are there and what those competencies are. If somebody wants to know what they are taking away from these courses, I can show them a list of 105 competencies that they are gaining from taking the courses and successfully passing the test.

Another thing I like about it is that as a trainer, it gives me the ability to not only easily put these courses on, but also when they are done, go in and dissect the person who took them and find out what those strengths are by the scoring of their tests and the competencies they have gained based on their scoring. It has helped me drive their career. For example, they might not be in the right field, so we will look at changing them to a different department or division based on their skill sets. It is all based on their scoring and the courses that they take. That helps me a lot. It is not a one-man show here. I have somebody who works part-time as an admin, but when you have 800 people and you are the one person putting this together, it is not easy, but CYPHER Learning makes it easy for me to dissect people's skills. I have had several people come up to me. In the last month alone, I have gotten a dozen nice emails that are to the president of the company and myself saying how much they like all the courses and how easy it is to take them. It is a game-changer for us. We are now able to open it up to the outside. We have created a wound certification course that has been recognized by the California Board of Nursing for continuing education credits, and it is all on CYPHER. We are able to keep it separate so that when people log in, they cannot see the rest of our catalog. They just see the course that we want them to take. That is nice too. I am glad CYPHER has allowed us to do that. It opened up a lot for us and helped us put our name out there. We are a leader in wound care at this point because of what we have been able to do through CYPHER. It has been a game-changer for us.

CYPHER Learning allows me to put in courses from another content learning tool. Through SCORM, it is so easy. You just have to type in a couple of things, maybe change a picture, for the catalog, and then it goes in very easily. I can create things outside and easily bring them into CYPHER Learning. For the user, it is seamless. They do not know the difference. I love CYPHER Learning for what we use it for, and I do not want to use any other LMS. It is easier for our admins and users.

There has been exponential improvement in our organization. We had our Christmas party on Saturday, and the speeches given in front of hundreds of people were about our learning platform, how great it has been, and how amazing this system has been. It has been a complete game-changer for our company to have our learning platform with CYPHER Learning. We started out with five to ten courses in the first couple of months, and I have been able to put in 132 courses now. We have been able to add so many courses, so many great videos, and so many great things. People just love it. They absolutely love it, and they cannot stop talking about it. I had so many people come up to me on Saturday and tell me how much they loved it.

It has been very helpful with the onboarding process. It is very easy for us to put someone starting new. We have something called a revenue cycle, where they intake people, and it goes all the way to billing and collections. It is a whole cycle of things that billing goes through with Medicare Part B. When somebody starts in that department, I can put them in that organization before they even start with the company. As long as I have their email, I put them in, and then I can set up courses for them to take on day one. It automatically goes on to the plan if they work in a certain organization, and we can preset all that. That is something huge for us. It saves us time. It saves us a lot of emails. When you start in a certain department, you have a series of courses already there waiting for you. That has helped a great deal to get somebody up and running quickly and get them trained quickly. Within a couple of weeks, I can get somebody up and running. Previously, it used to take about eight to ten weeks.

We use it as a learning management system (LMS). I create our e-classes in the LMS and also upload them. All our classes and students are in CYPHER Learning.

We are able to offer flexible learning. After the pandemic, classes are 50% on-site and 50% online, eliminating the need for more classrooms. We did not go fully face-to-face after the pandemic. We went to blended learning, so we do not have to create more classrooms.

It has saved us a lot of printing costs and effort because we do not have to print the syllabus anymore. Our syllabus is on average 12 pages long and if a student takes seven courses, it will be around 84 pages. We have around 10,000 students. You can imagine the volume of paper that we had to print. We do not do that anymore. We were also printing handouts before. We do not print them as well.

With CYPHER Learning, we are able to offer fully online courses. We have a degree completion program for students who left school because of some reason and could not finish their degrees. They are now working and do not have time to come back to school and attend classes. With CYPHER Learning, we were able to reach out to them and offer them fully online classes. They do not have to come to school physically. They can follow their courses online, and they are able to finish their degrees. For us, that is a big plus because we are able to help our former students finish their degrees with CYPHER Learning.

For every course, in the syllabus, aside from the learning plan, we also have the learning outcomes for the skills. We align every lesson with the learning outcome. We are able to do every assessment and exam within the platform. We are able to align lessons, assessments, and learning outcomes and check if the learning outcomes have been achieved.

When it comes to AI, as a university, we created our AI policy just this year, and we are slowly rolling it out to the faculty members and students. For the teachers, we have subscribed to CYPHER Copilot. We have not yet rolled it out to all the faculty members. We have picked a few teachers to use it to create complete courses, especially for the subjects that are offered for the first time. We also offer creative courses that run for a few weeks, and we use Copilot for that. One thing I like about it is that we do not have to start from scratch. We can give it a syllabus to create the lessons. It was fairly accurate. We loved the outcomes, but it is not 100% there. After creating the course, we still have some work to do. However, before AI, it took us months to create a complete course, whereas now, it would not take that long because it has already created some of the things for us. We just need to add or remove a few things. It has done about 80% of the job and we have to do the remaining 20%.

We have integrated it with Microsoft 365. The integration is seamless and perfect. We can create things like webinars. Within the module itself, we can create a schedule for a meeting. We can also create one on the announcement or news page. We can create a meeting there, and everyone has access to it. The storage for Microsoft 365, in OneDrive, is also integrated there. It is very easy to access the files from OneDrive from the platform.

It has saved our course creation time by a lot. We can create a complete course in ten minutes. Previously, it took us months.

It has been excellent for us. I am the director of the Center for Innovative Learning Programs, and this is the office that manages CYPHER Learning. Before becoming the director, I was a Learning supervisor. To train our teachers, we have face-to-face learning and also self-paced training. We created these training courses in our platform, which we call Schoolbook. Other teachers have the option to do face-to-face or online training. Some prefer face-to-face training, while others prefer online training. With CYPHER Learning, we are able to provide that option. It is being utilized 100% by our faculty members. Everyone, our students and faculty members, uses this platform. It is not just for uploading our lessons or lesson contents or conducting assessments. It has also become a communication platform for everyone. If there are school announcements, we put them there. For example, announcements of no classes are shown on the platform. Also, if some offices want to tell the community about something, they give it to us and we announce it on the platform. It is not just for classes but also for communication and collaboration with the community.

I am an instructional designer, and my job is to build courses and integrate them into CYPHER Learning. I have a person who works for me as the administrator and is responsible for enrolling people in the course and tracking their progress.

We needed a learning management system to track our users. We have about 5,000 users online. We did not start that big, but we had to track their learning through many courses.

Our company also enables schools, typically in the secondary and higher education markets, to teach the courses that we design. We needed them to be able to have a layer of administrative control that allowed them to teach the courses but not change the courses. Having different administrative levels or user permissions was very important to us.

We are very happy with the interoperability of CYPHER Learning with other solutions. We have found them to be very responsive whenever we need anything. We have used it with Credly, which is a digital badging software. We have integrated it with HubSpot, which is a client resource management software, and we also host our website on that. We were able to do that. We have also integrated it with a company called GMetrix, which is a third-party testing solution through LTI features.

We have not used CYPHER Learning internally for onboarding clients. It is our core product that we sell to other companies, and it has been very useful in onboarding teachers and things like that. Its tracking features and reporting features are very helpful. It is a very intuitive learning management system, and the experience has been positive.

It saves us on manpower, especially on reporting and calculations, as we used to do things with spreadsheets. That was very manpower-intensive. The reporting features are very good.

We use it for asynchronous learning across our institution.

First, use of CYPHER Learning was able to save us from the effects of the pandemic. There are many schools in the Philippines that have downsized, where student enrollment became lower compared to previous years. And some schools have closed down. We actually trained other education institutions on how to deliver online and blended learning, because we had done it so much.

Even before the pandemic, 75 percent of our faculty was already using CYPHER Learning, so we just had to target the other 25 percent. We formed a committee of our experts in using CYPHER Learning to help influence that 25 percent, so that ultimately we did not have to cancel or cut our education programs. Everything continued despite the pandemic. We finished our academic calendar, as planned, but in the new modality. Without CYPHER Learning, I don't think we would have been able to do that.

Our university, De La Salle University – Dasmariñas, is the greenest campus in the Philippines and has been for many years now. One of the ways we have been able to achieve that is thanks to CYPHER Learning, through paperless transactions. For example, many teachers upload exams. And we are not required to print a syllabus. It's already uploaded online. Previously, the university would spend between 50,000 to 100,000 Philippine pesos on printing it, so we are already saving that much on the syllabus alone. When adding in not having to print out all of our exams, we are saving hundreds of thousands of pesos on printing costs.

In addition, we save a lot in terms of office costs such as electricity for air conditioning because we can work from home. A given department has three days onsite and another three days online when they are not required to go to the school. That alone saves a lot of costs related to the environment, such as greenhouse gasses resulting from transportation. We save millions of pesos on electricity alone because we're not required to be onsite as much as we used to be.

Our former director had a study done, in partnership with our environmental management center, and they were able to track how much carbon footprint and how much paper we have saved by using CYPHER Learning. Per student, we're saving a lot, financially, thanks to CYPHER Learning.

Competency-based learning is very important for our institution. There is a commission of higher education that manages and monitors all higher education modalities. We can continue delivering online learning or blended learning for as long as we're able to prove that it's effective. We need to be able to prove that the modality, whether synchronous or asynchronous, is effective, and one way to do that is to measure how well students are able to achieve the learning outcomes. So it's actually a must. It's not optional. We have an upcoming accreditation next year and we are already preparing the documents to prove that this type of modality influences learning outcomes. We have some data and we're still generating more.

The platform has helped to reduce administrative work. We can easily produce the reports required for accreditation, using the reporting features in CYPHER Learning, like the utilization and active accounts. We have also just started integrating it with our SIS (student information system). It's not yet perfect, but we're getting close to where we envisioned ourselves. That integration has also helped to reduce administrative costs a lot.

In terms of the amount of time saved on administrative work, my team is solely in charge of adding and dropping students. It would take us months to do that manually, as we have 12,000 to 14,000 students. Because of the SIS integration, it's automated. We just troubleshoot any problems that may arise. The integration is saving us 90 percent of the time it would take us for that alone. Also, only those with active Office 365 accounts can log in to our learning management system. There is a way to create the accounts in bulk, but it would take several days to complete thousands of accounts. Thanks to SSO we don't have to do that. We just let the system do its work. That also saves a lot of time.

We are using it for our technical training and onboarding.

Before the pandemic, almost all our training interventions occurred in physical spaces and simulation areas. Our trainees were mostly asked to report to the head office for a minimum of five days up to months (for some critical positions). Since we started to use the CYPHER Learning, we have been able to see a drastic improvement the length of our learning duration to about half of the previous number of days that we conducted these training interventions.

CYPHER Learning is instrumental in enabling Potato Corner to be at the forefront of remote learning engagement practices in the Philippines. In fact, Potato Corner is an active case study for some local companies, in terms of bringing value and cost savings - locally and abroad. 

The ability of the system to be used by our international support and store network is an advantage. For example, CYPHER Learning has the capacity to translate dialects or languages which helped us conduct a learning experience similar to how an actual hands on session is done. Just recently we had pilot runs using the translation capability of the system for new store openings in China and the Middle East China using Mandarin and Arabic as medium of discussions.

In terms of the platform availability, there is access to 24 hours, so we don't need to determine a specific time for training. We just give them a link, password, and period for them to complete, e.g., 5 days, then it is up to them. What's important is they pass the minimum requirements to pass the training like periodic exams and the certification process.

The solution has helped us not just survive, but get through the challenges of the pandemic with flying colors. Before, we were quite adamant on remote training practices, since for close to 28 years, our company did not venture into remote training practices. Only two years ago, that we took a major step to prove that remote training can actually be a part of the company's core programs to ensure an engaged and competent workforce. 

At the university where I work, we use the platform for everything related to undergraduate training. This is for the 30 career paths that we have at the university for approximately 5,000 students.

Right now, CYPHER Learning is being applied at the undergraduate level, but we are planning to increase and migrate it to the university level.

At the pedagogical level, we have applied a cascade strategy. They gave all teachers three weeks to learn how to use CYPHER Learning in the midst of the pandemic. So, we selected one to two teachers to be trained with CYPHER Learning and represent each of the careers, then they replicated that training to approximately 15 teachers each. This way, teachers in the same area trained their colleagues.

Our previous platform had forums, but CYPHER Learning has been able to help a lot with this. For example, I use the discussion and debate manual with students who usually are not very participatory but very critical and analytic in the platform. That is how I discovered that these are very good students. These activities are quite meaningful because students have greatly appreciated the use of the platform, which provides them with a certain order. Also, teachers can give them direct feedback, comments, and even voice notes on the platform.

It is my work platform for every single use case at the school.

The task system in CYPHER Learning provides a tool that helps us improve as an institute. We can see the progress report of each student in a general way. By watching the progress of all students, we can receive transparent feedback.

It helped us facilitate critical thinking. This is important because it facilitates the individual commitment and autonomy of the student in their learning. For example, I upload different materials, both audiovisual or visual, then the student can order their own material according to their own learning rhythm. It is also able to create it in a way that is not boring.

CYPHER Learning has a high capacity to work with a range of learning styles and rhythms. It was friendly and didactic enough to be able to adapt to the COVID situation. I keep my jobs and projects uploaded through CYPHER Learning. I also do this for my face-to-face classes.

The solution has given the rest of the technical team more time for other functions within the educational center. There are only two people dedicated to CYPHER Learning. Administratively, this reduces the cost of expenses and personnel. It has been good for distributing personnel into other technical information management functions.

When we are engaged in an agreement with a school district, we will create their organization on the platform and customize it. There is a portal that we can customize with their logo, images, and colors. These are our own clients, so I am using the platform as if I own the platform. There are a lot of different features and things that I can customize for our clients. So, we create their organization, then we copy our master courses into their organization. We then meet with their principals and devise an action plan for how the district will use the courses that we offer.

Some of the schools within the district will use the courses as online self-paced learning. Some of them will use it as an online textbook. Thus, the teachers use the courses and facilitate the learning from our courses on the platform with their students. Some students will create accounts where they will have accounts in the platform and access our courses as they go through the CYPHER Learning platform.

One of the things that we are really excited about is being able to tie the state or national standards as competencies. Then, when students complete a course, they are awarded certain competencies or standards that we have aligned with the course. This shows schools evidence that students are meeting standards. Right now, we are not tying any of our courses with how schools are testing and assessing students. However, our company goals are to provide access to STEM for all students and help schools engage with communities to develop the STEM talent and workforce, which then impacts a community's economic development.

Our metrics will be students being exposed to STEM. I love that I can see how many students have completed courses as well as what that means on our end in terms of their exposure and experiences in STEM. It ties different metrics to our understanding of students' progress. We can understand, from the percentage of students in an entire school district, how many have been exposed or completed courses. This is really attractive to our clients. Therefore, this helps us develop our client base.