CYPHER Learning Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has a good level of integration with different applications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CYPHER Learning's price is good.

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

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

I am a computer science teacher and I use it to help facilitate my class. I'm not a typical "sage on the stage" teacher, I'm more like a "guide on the side." I use CYPHER Learning to fully implement my curriculum for my students.

Automation helps save time when it comes to the assessment of assignments. I can set up some assignments so that the platform automatically grades students. I can spend more time developing content and not so much time grading. Taking the time to set it up properly helps with that automation, and the students get immediate feedback so they know exactly how well they've done. I can then look at the analytics, once they've done those assignments, and gauge who's doing well and who needs a little bit more help. It's very important and helpful.

I throw in a survey-type self-assessment for my students. I can go through each lesson and I can see how well they think they did versus how their actual grade matches up. I can identify students or classes to go back to and say, "Maybe we're going to take a little bit more time on this content." I can do that one-on-one or in a small group as well. It's essential in helping me to identify who needs help or who's ready for more advanced lessons or assignments.

CYPHER Learning is also very efficient when it comes to helping me understand how well my students understand concepts, by using the assessments, analytics, and feedback. My students can interact with me within the system to let me know if they have questions. I can engage with them as they're working and field questions or clear up anything that they may have an issue with.

Another benefit of the platform is classroom management. When my students know exactly what they need to be doing, it cuts down on the extra time that could lead to poor classroom management. It's all about them buying in at the beginning and getting my students to invest in the system. They know what they're supposed to be doing. CYPHER Learning has been very beneficial in that way.

An aspect that is also extremely important is the fact that teachers can track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid. As an organization, that's one of the things our administrators look for when they come into the room, the objectives and the competencies, and what teachers are doing to help students achieve competencies with their pedagogy in the classroom.

CYPHER Learning helps me to provide self-pacing for students in my class. Because the system enables me to add videos and resources such as PDFs, a lot of that content is me in the video, so they don't have to go to outside sources. I can take care of those students who are proficient by giving them those materials, and that allows them to move along at their own pace. And for those students who need extra time on things, I have that time to spend with them while others move ahead. It helps me to reach everybody.

The system also helps reduce administrative work because it offers analytics and spreadsheet downloads. If I need to see grades for students, I can see them all at once or pull grade reports for individual students. I can look at individual grades from the different classes that I've set up that cover different competencies. I can print all of that out and share it with parents. Everything is right at your fingertips.

There are cost savings because it's all digital. There's really no need for printing. I can convert documents to PDFs or do videos. It really helps because it's online. I have to be out of school tomorrow, but I don't have to make copies of things for students or the substitute teacher. I just outline what my students are doing online and the substitute and the students know exactly what they need to be doing.

The mastery grid CYPHER Learning is the most important feature. With my curriculum, in Mississippi, we are required to keep up and track as our students master specific objectives and standards. With CYPHER Learning, that process is built-in. I can customize it to my liking, and I have all of that data right at my fingertips. It's amazing.

Similarly, the competency-based learning is also extremely important because, with my curriculum, in the state of Mississippi, funding is a key factor. We have to keep up with how well our students are doing on specific competencies and standards. I've got all of the data and the system backs it up. It's very critical.

Tagging assignments with competencies goes along with the mastery feature. When I'm looking at that mastery list, I can see assignments, lessons, a group of lessons, or a specific quiz I have tagged and I can immediately see which assessments match specific competencies and determine if I need to change things up or develop something a little bit more.

Gamification is another feature that I've recently really gotten into and I have found that my students really enjoy getting points and badges. That reinforcement is critical. One of the things that my school stresses is positive reinforcement for our students. With gamification, my students get that instant gratification. They get specific scores when they do specific tasks within CYPHER Learning and it lets them know. It's a really big motivator for my students.

The gamification aspect is extremely easy to use, as long as you have an idea of what you want to do. The system is very intuitive and you just create your game and your points. Another thing I like about it is that you can retroactively add points for something. You might think, "Hey, I want to give points for a specific task that has already been done." You can go back, create that point system or badge, and it will retroactively award the student who's already done that assignment as well as capture those who have yet to begin.

It's also very easy for students to use gamified learning materials. They just do the work; what they would already be doing. It doesn't take any extra effort for them to be involved in it because it's built into the assignments or the lessons. As long as they're doing their work and engaging with the system, they are rewarded for their participation.

And the reward automation is a time-saver for me. It's a set-it-and-forget-it feature. The system continues working after you set it up and you know that the students will be rewarded. The system is going to make sure that the students are aware that they are participating in it.

The platform is also really good in terms of integrations with other technologies. I use and integrate a lot of video content, with SCORM features, to create automated assignments. There are other websites out there, but CYPHER Learning makes it possible to have everything in-house for me and my students. It's a one-stop shop.

I'm able to manage all of my needs for all of my students on my own. From year-to-year, as I create content, I am able to tweak things or reuse assignments, which cuts down on the amount of time I have to spend on preparing.

While the number of apps available for integration with CYPHER Learning has increased over the years, I would love to see this number continue to grow. I believe this would help solidify its position amongst other learning management systems as a viable option for educators and schools.

I've been using CYPHER LEARNING since 2010 or 2011.

I'm extremely impressed, from year to year, with the things that they are doing as far as keeping up with how the platform should look and what it should offer. It's always ahead of where other LMSs are.

They have been very responsive to my needs. There is an online support system that you go to if you're having an issue.

Positive

The initial setup was completely straightforward. When I began using CYPHER Learning it was as simple as getting the URL and sharing it with my students. I don't think it could get any simpler than that. Because I'm in a computer lab, I have my students save that web address in a bookmark.

There is minimal maintenance. For any issues that are encountered, CYPHER LEARNING is very responsive.

I have absolutely seen a return on investment. It shows students their percentage of completion and I'm getting more students to do more work. They see what they have to do. They'll say, "I'm at this percentage of completion, and this is my mastery so far." The buy-in is worth it to get that from students.

Some of the previous solutions I used were free, but I feel that it's worth it to pay for CYPHER Learning and get that autonomy and creativity and personalization. I feel that students want and need something that is not just the status quo. They want to be able to engage with something that speaks to them, so they're not just trying to check a box on an objective. It actually gets them involved in the process of learning. It gets a student to say, "Ok, this is something I have to do, but I'm really enjoying what I have to do. I get to interact with my teacher and with other students." That was something that some of the other platforms were lacking.

The pricing is worth the peace of mind that it gives teachers, due to the ability to create an experience for their students. It's not just about the assignments they have to do. Teachers can create a narrative and a direction for their students and have them immersed in that environment. Learning is something that all students have to do, but why not make it fun? Why not be able to offer an experience that is engaging and that allows them to participate and add to that narrative?

I had worked with several different LMSs because, in the state of Mississippi, when you're going to teach my specific subject, you go through training on different LMS platforms. I found that a lot was lacking in those platforms and that CYPHER Learning gives me more autonomy, creativity, and personalization in my class compared to Blackboard, Google Classroom, or Moodle. Now, the state of Mississippi uses Canvas, but I still prefer to use CYPHER Learning.

One of the main things that I really loved when I initially started out with CYPHER Learning was that it was different from everything else out there. They keep up the user interface and it's like an encompassing community for my students. That way, they're not having to go to a lot of different websites for much of what they're doing. I can set it up to minimize distractions and the need to go to different websites to do assignments.

Also, CYPHER Learning serves as an extension of myself, my teaching philosophy, and the experiences that I want to give to my students. When they're working through a lesson, in a sense, they're sitting down and working with me personally, and that's something that I strive to do ahead of time. It may take a few extra minutes, and maybe hours, upfront, to capture that opportunity for my students to be working with me, but it's worth it. So the platform is just an extension of me and I'm able to get all the creativity out there and encourage my students to be as creative in how they interact and engage. I can promote the joy of learning.

Another factor was ease of use. A lot of the other platforms that I used didn't have the intuitiveness that I have with CYPHER Learning. It made me want to explore and use as many features as possible to get the most out of it for my students.

I feel that CYPHER Learning is always ahead of the curve when it comes to educational technology. It's really helpful that they have a roadmap of things that they are looking to implement. They're keeping up with the trends in education. And we are also able to provide feedback directly to them. They're constantly working to improve the platform. I couldn't ask for anything more specific because I feel they're already on top of it. But if there were something that they needed to add, they're always open to suggestions.

My advice would be to look into the ability that CYPHER Learning offers for teachers to create their own paths for their students; the autonomy, creativity, and personalization provided by CYPHER Learning. Also, consider the automation and being able to create content or assessments that work for you and don't add to your time. There are only so many hours in the day for educators, administrators, or people in the industry. It's a platform that works with you to see you through to the goals that you envision.

CYPHER Learning houses everything I need to function, day-to-day, in my classroom.

We use it to provide online courses for distance learning students.

We have both teachers and admin staff who work with the platform. Teachers can see student submissions and our admin staff can manage our course content and eCommerce.

We can customize our ordering system so we can have the data that we need to communicate with our students, their families, and our staff. 

We can collect surveys, using the LMS platform, from our students on how their courses are going. 

The ordering process is automated. When students register for a course, their course is set up automatically. We can manually register them when needed, as needed.

CYPHER Learning has helped by providing a variety of activities to help students get engaged, developing their independence and higher-order thinking skills. The quizzes and tests help keep our students engaged in developing their skills. I would rate the importance of this as 10 out of 10 for our organization.

CYPHER Learning has helped us save time on intervention strategies for students, especially those who need guidance. 

We provide a great program and having a top LMS system is essential. Our students love the platform, from what we hear. One of the things that they love about our courses is the LMS system's ease and use.

The navigation is easy to use. 

It is very easy for educators to communicate with students using the CYPHER Learning messaging system, which is imperative for our organization.

There are many applications available as add-ons. There are so many that we have not used all of them, but are happy to know we have more than we currently need.

It can maintain an infinite database of our students.

The solution is top-notch for tagging classes and assignments. The tagging is great for ensuring that the content is compliant with standards.

Work more closely with Cypher customers when launching new versions of the platform before going live.

I have been using it for 12 years. Our company started delivering programs in 2010, and we started using CYPHER Learning in 2013.

CYPHER Learning is definitely a stable solution. We have experienced less than 1% downtime.

The platform is set up so there are no capacity limits. Our program can grow as much as we want it to grow. We don't have any constraints around how many more courses we can offer or how many students we can add. There are no constraints around that.

The scalability is infinite. There aren't any limitations on what we can or can't do.

Their tech support is top-notch. When there is an issue, we are always able to find a workaround that meets our specific needs. The tech support team help us with that. An example is using the reporting feature. If there is something that we need in a report and we can't get all the data in the default template of the report, then we can work with the tech support team who will show us how to customize it.

I would rate the technical support as 9.9 out of 10. It is almost perfect.

Positive

Before we moved to the CYPHER Learning platform, we tried another vendor and it didn't work.

We used another vendor in the beginning, which was low cost. We were a brand new company then, so we used what we could afford at the time. We switched because CYPHER Learning has everything. We were going to have to keep adding to what we had with the previous solution, so it was going to become cost-prohibitive.

I had an IT specialist, who was looking at our current system, recommend CYPHER Learning. He did a little research, and said, "This is the one you need." When we started using them, he was more than right.

The initial setup is easy. 

It took just one day to get it up and running. We were up the day that we started using it.

It is so user-friendly. You can create a course, and have that course up the same day. Though, it does depend on how much content is in your course.

One admin was initially needed for the deployment, which does depend on the size of the deployment. Now, we have four admins working on it. There are also teachers who upload content.

When I first started, I wanted the enterprise package. We had to build up our student base to get up to the number of students that we needed to be in that enterprise package. Then, we had a 100% return on investment within the first year of using the program.

Our time saving increased by 70%, going from manual to automated.

The solution has definitely helped us reduce our administrative work. It gives us the ability to provide distance learning for students who are not all in the same area, which is valuable. 

The amount of time that we need to use the LMS system to quantify things is minimal.

CYPHER Learning has 100% helped us save on costs related to printing materials, textbook acquisitions, and license fees. It is instant for our students when we update or come up with a new version of our programs because we use this platform. If we need to modify a quiz, update a course, or add new material, all our students receive that instantly. There is no reprinting. There are no out-of-pocket costs for us. Also, there isn't a time delay for students.

CYPHER Learning has helped reduce the number of staff needed to manage our learning management system (LMS). It would likely triple our staff and admin if we weren't using it.

We do a monthly subscription.

It is priced competitively. Their pricing is one of the best in the industry. They are not the cheapest solution, but they are not the most expensive. The value that they provide, for what we pay, is invaluable. There are no add-on costs.

We have been using it for so long, and we wouldn't use a different platform. It is the best platform out there. It has become part of our daily environment, where we use it all day long.

The solution's ability to bridge our student's learning gap is at the top of the industry.

I talk with other schools who discuss their platforms. They always want our platform.

Don't waste a lot of time evaluating other programs. This is the best one out there.

We have plans to increase our usage of CYPHER Learning.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

We develop 3D design software for engineers. Our product portfolio is a complex ecosystem and, therefore, we support our software sales with training services to enable our customers to get the most out of our products. CYPHER Learning is the heart of our global online training platform.

Before implementing CYPHER Learning, our training activity followed the traditional setup with classroom-based training. With an online training platform, we can reach our end-users directly and with CYPHER Learning we can track both learner and trainer activities. This helps a lot in staff resource planning and in scheduling content development and release. With the help of CYPHER Learning, we can make data-driven decisions, while previously we did not have this level of insight. At the same time, the platform is still capable of supporting traditional classroom-based training activities, so switching to an online platform was a significant change as it opened up a lot of new opportunities.

It has also helped to reduce our costs. Previously, we had to invest in training facilities, equip the rooms with computers, and hire and train the instructors. Now, our training landscape is more diverse: self-paced training is available everywhere, including in countries where we do not have local representatives. We can reach them easily at a very low cost. In certain markets, where the learners are scattered throughout a huge territory, it is more economical to deliver online training. We don't have to invest in classrooms and equipment. Certainly, we had to set up a studio where we can record training sessions with good-quality cameras, microphones, and studio lights. That required some investment. But it is just a single studio compared to dozens of fully equipped classrooms around the world.

In our business, the lack of knowledge on the customer side can be a barrier to sales. If you don't know how to use the software, you simply won't buy it. With online training, the entry barrier of training is really low: you don't have to travel to a training facility or to a different city. You can just sit in front of your own computer and access all the training materials. Using CYPHER Learning made it possible to eliminate the knowledge barrier.

It is really important that our end-users can choose the way they learn, online or offline, self-paced or trainer-led. Whatever format the learners prefer, they will get instant feedback about their progress and performance. We did research when we kickstarted online training back in 2020 and found that with gamification we can inspire people to progress and learn more. Learners can collect points, earn badges, and get certified. In the online world, people prefer to learn in small chunks, and if you give a small award for each chunk as a kind of instant and positive feedback, it drives learners to continue learning. Overall, it helps us to have more active learners and generate a healthy buzz around our site.

CYPHER Learning enables us to configure various automation rules and then the system automatically reacts to certain end-user actions. Having a lot of active learners on the front end means a lot of administrative tasks on the back end. But with rules we can automate most of these repetitive processes, so we try to automate as many things as possible.

On the back end, the most important feature is the built-in reporting, which makes it possible to track all of the user activities: what kind of courses the learners enroll in, how they are progressing, and when they complete a course. We have full insight, and we can analyze the captured data, see the trends, and predict the future to a certain extent. Also, with the API connections, we built an ecosystem around CYPHER Learning that automates financial reporting and a custom log-in solution.

There is also an exchange format called SCORM and you can migrate training materials made on other platforms with the help of that data exchange format. This feature can be very important for those companies that already use a learning management system and want to switch to CYPHER Learning.

We manage a huge number of registered users and also offer a large number of courses on our platform, and our courses are offered via a large number of organizations. It's a very complex setup, but CYPHER LEARNING did an excellent job of fixing the initial speed issues we had.

We are also considering how we can improve the user experience. There are some customization options in CYPHER Learning that we haven’t utilized yet, but with the help of these we want to make our site more attractive to paying customers.

Finally, we are very excited about the improved and flexible access that is already in CYPHER LEARNING’s development pipeline.

We have been using it since March 2020.

If I remember correctly, they warrant a 99.999 percent uptime, which is exceptional. We have never faced any major breakdowns or issues since we started using CYPHER Learning.

Scalability has a lot of aspects. One of them is pricing, and CYPHER LEARNING offers scalable pricing plans for small, medium, and large institutes and businesses as well. Technically speaking, in CYPHER Learning you can set up multiple organizations within your platform and you can also link multiple platforms into a network and use common resources.

We have a global training business and multiple teams are using CYPHER Learning around the world. Our learners come from nearly 200 countries, covering every continent. We have established multiple organizations that provide courses in many languages, while the user interface of CYPHER Learning is translated into more than 50 languages.

Cypher Learning’s technical support is excellent. We are very satisfied with the experienced response rate and speed. They have a support forum where we can ask questions or raise concerns and, in most cases, they answer within minutes.

Positive

We used Moodle for specific purposes, but we managed only a couple of courses on that platform. Moodle is free and may be a great solution for non-profit education institutes, but it completely lacks e-commerce features and, according to our standards, it is not scalable. After implementing CYPHER Learning, we migrated the courses and phased out Moodle.

We launched the site during the outbreak of the pandemic and the release was a relatively smooth process. We did not face any major difficulties. Although we wanted to integrate the platform with other company systems right at the beginning, which proved to be a more complex task and required some planning and in-house development, we managed to go live within six weeks: two to three staff members were involved in setting up the platform, while a bigger number was working on producing the digital version of our existing training materials.

If I look at the big picture—overall company sales, not just training—which is more important for us, we definitely have seen return on our investment and the result is the same if we look at training as a standalone business.

Overall, the pricing of CYPHER Learning is okay. There are cheaper solutions that offer way fewer features and there are more expensive and more capable solutions, but they might be overkill for many companies that are not big enough. It's about balance. CYPHER Learning is in the middle; not very expensive, not very cheap.

You can start out small, at a relatively cheap price. Within two years, we have grown significantly. They are really flexible regarding the pricing and they can manage companies of all sizes with their pricing and policies. There are different price levels for X number of users and Y number of users and they offer a lot of options. That was an important factor.

We evaluated Adobe Captivate. It's a capable tool but it comes with a hefty price tag, which is not a surprise if you consider that it was made primarily for large global companies. The entry barrier is very high for that solution. We also evaluated some other products, but most of those were either tailored to certain business types or developed mainly for internal training and lacked scalability and flexibility.

Start small and grow as you go. Build a scalable solution. You can set up multiple organizations within your platform, and you can link multiple CYPHER Learning instances together into a network as you grow your business. The good news is that CYPHER Learning fully supports this approach with its gradual pricing.

We onboard all our students into the platform and use it on a day-to-day basis for lessons, online classes, assessments, grading, and tabulation. We use it administratively and operationally.

CYPHER Learning is a core part of our students' journeys, as well as a core part of our lecturers' processes. Especially with the pandemic, everything has moved to digital. Today and for years to come, even if COVID is no longer around, the hybrid mode of learning will stay within our organization at least, because of the direction that our company is going. It's a nine out of 10, because we've built everything that we have operationally in CYPHER Learning. The product itself is amazing in terms of helping us to streamline all the processes and it saves us a lot of time.

The time savings are the result of a number of things. First, all tabulation of data has been automated. In the past, we would need to manually move things from paper to Excel and then do some manual calculations or use formulas in Excel to determine a student's grade. Now, we can set the rubric and everything is automated. If it is set up well, I just go in and export. That saves a tremendous amount of time. Another area that it helps us save so much time in is the administration of adding and updating student information, communicating with students, and making sure they are aware of what classes they're supposed to be in and their schedules. All that is communicated via CYPHER Learning. That has streamlined our processes and saved a lot of our time for the administrative staff.

We use CYPHER Learning for assessments but because most of our assessments go through Turnitin, the ability to integrate it with a lot of our third-party service providers like Turnitin, through a plugin, is helpful. There aren't many learning management systems that integrate so well with different APIs and LTIs, especially when a school has various tools in its tech stack. In addition to Turnitin, we are also subscribers of Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Skillshare. Integrating those platforms and having our user profiles, as well as progress and results integrated fully with our LMS, has been very helpful because it becomes like a one-stop center. Everything works perfectly and smoothly and is good for our customer experience.

Also, the way that we work is that our organization is a group of companies. We might have one program that we run in a couple of different schools. We can create content in one place and then very quickly duplicate the classes. CYPHER Learning has what it calls "parent" classes, that are like templates. We can duplicate them and create child classes from there. That makes content creation very easy. And it's very easy to update as well. We just update it in one place and sync it across all the child classes. It saves us time because we just do it once and then the system helps us to replicate it over time.

The ability to track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid is very important to us and it's not just for teachers and our lecturers. It's also helpful for our administrators. We have a talent management department that looks into job placements for students. Information on student skills development—what level of competency they have acquired thus far—is relevant to that team.

And especially for our pre-university program, we encourage lecturers to utilize the group function to reach out to students and communicate with them. That really opens up room for our students to ask any questions about a particular class. If a student is not very interactive in class, they have other means of reaching out to their lecturers.

When it comes to automating assessments and providing recommendations, I would rate the solution at eight, on a scale of one to 10. I just got off a call with our CYPHER Learning contacts this morning and one of the things that I brought up was that we have 100 percent of our students on the platform, but not 100 percent of our students have access to third-party platforms like Coursera, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning. Some form of customization would be good in terms of the API and how it integrates with third-party platforms. If we had control of that, I would give it a nine out of 10.

Also tagging classes and assignments with competencies is seven or seven and a half out of 10. We need the customization part sorted out so that we can control who has access to what kind of content. That's an area that needs improvement.

I would also like to see improvement to the mobile app, because our students are mobile-first. In our day-to-day interaction with students, if they can do everything on their mobile phones, that would be what they would appreciate the most. We know that's not entirely possible, especially when it comes to assessments.

Also, there are certain push notification features that I have noticed CYPHER Learning does not have. It does send notifications via the app, but not push notifications. I tested it this morning and it doesn't quite work, so that would be another area for improvement. Students really need the app to work better.

I have been using CYPHER LEARNING since 2016, but more extensively since 2019.

It's generally stable. Recently we've had some caching issues. Every once in a while we run into errors. But with the customer support team, everything feels very manageable. If a system fails, as long as the support team is able to answer our questions, we are able to provide the necessary support to our end-users. 

Overall, it's fairly stable, with occasional errors or problems. But the support team is top-notch and that gives us a sense of trust.

It's very scalable.

BAC Education Group consists of 42 companies, but in terms of educational institutions, there are six. One is a training company targeting working adults and professionals. The rest are tertiary education institutions. We deploy CYPHER Learning for all these institutions. We also use it for training and development of all of our 350 to 400 staff. In terms of location, we have students from across the region including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. They are all over Asia, especially in our postgraduate studies. Overall, we have about 8,000 users.

We use the product extensively for everything to do with learning and assessment. Administratively, we use it for student data and more. The product is great and fits our use case perfectly. All our assessments have been moved online, so CYPHER Learning is our source of information now. We generate reports to understand how our students are faring in a particular skill or for a particular assignment, or even on exams.

One of the things that has been a highlight for me is working with the team at CYPHER LEARNING and their customer support, which is incomparable to the support of most other products out there. We get assistance almost instantaneously. 

In our organization we get a lot of inquiries from students, especially when it comes to exams where students are highly stressed. If something happens to the system, we need an immediate solution or at least for the service provider to get back to us on what exactly went wrong. Working with their team has been extremely helpful. We can trust that at any point in time we're able to reach out to the customer support team. Sometimes we run our exams in the evening and submissions could be due at 11:59 PM. If something goes wrong at that time, students are extremely stressed out about whether their submissions went through or not. Their support has been very helpful in giving us, as the team that's facing our customers directly, peace of mind. And it indirectly helps our students as well because they get their inquiries answered fairly quickly. If there is anything I want to recommend CYPHER Learning for, it's definitely the support that has been given to us thus far.

Positive

BAC Education Group has colleges and nonprofits and we used Moodle previously for our colleges. We explored Canvas as well for some of our programs, because we are partners with certain universities. Our students do use both Canvas and CYPHER Learning, but internally we use CYPHER Learning. For the nonprofit side, we used Teachable before and we are now using a system called Thinkific.

In terms of cost, CYPHER Learning is about the same as what we were using but it's the product offering and the incomparable customer service that are the reasons we have stuck with it for so long. We've stopped using Moodle, Canvas, and Teachable. What drew us to CYPHER Learning is the integration, customer support, the product itself, and the look of the platform for our students.

The reason we're on Thinkific for our nonprofit side is that you pay a fixed amount and then you can reach out to as many students as possible. Because of the business use case, we opted for that rather than CYPHER Learning. Our team is used to CYPHER Learning and we would love for the nonprofit to move into it as well, but it's really difficult, especially because we have about 200,000 students on that platform. We would like to stick to CYPHER Learning, but cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense for a nonprofit.

We bought CYPHER Learning licenses in 2016. The initial team that was running the e-learning department is no longer around. My team and I took over in 2019 to relaunch it. We weren't there at the beginning in terms of deciding which platform to go with, but we were part of the implementation team and the onboarding and adoption.

When my team took over our organization's e-learning functions, we reached out to the CYPHER Learning team and started from scratch. It was fairly easy. We still had to figure out processes and standard operating procedures, because we were rolling it out campus-wide, but the CYPHER Learning team was very supportive and they were there when we needed answers.

The huge ROI for us is the fact that it's such a core product of our day-to-day offerings to our students. That really speaks volumes.

We have phased out printing some of our books, but the costs of printing have been moved to other requirements because we have had to invest in e-book readers.

For our for-profit entities, CYPHER Learning is the perfect solution in terms of cost. It is not too expensive and is about the same as what other service providers charge. 

In terms of competency-based learning, our college has just started looking into micro-credentialing. Most of our students have a set of classes they need to take and anything outside of that is up to their own discretion to pursue. But now, if a student is in the school of hospitality, for example, we don't just upskill them within the scope of hospitality, but we also try to impart or get them to complete courses in Coursera and Skillshare and LinkedIn Learning on things like communication skills or project management. We are starting to go into skills development, looking at the more holistic side of things, and that means looking into skills competencies. Micro-credentialing is very important and I would love to see CYPHER Learning really driving that and making it easier for students to display the talents and skills and projects that they've worked on in their profiles.

When it comes to skills development, a lot of it is about the content. CYPHER Learning has become that one platform that all of us, lecturers and students, use. It's like a staple in our everyday lives. It has been really difficult for us to inculcate that behavior. We've finally been able to. I'm very happy that the platform's features have helped us to get to where we are today. It plays a very core role in skills development for our students. It's the backbone of that process, along with our content.

I would definitely recommend using CYPHER Learning. We looked into various solutions prior to this one and there's a reason we have stuck with it for years. In fact, we have increased our subscriptions and onboarded new customers into it. I would definitely recommend CYPHER Learning, as long as it's for a for-profit organization.

We use it for grading and all my class assignments.

I used it during COVID. So, we had distance learning where we were doing Zoom, then I would still have the students do their assignments in CYPHER Learning during the distance learning.

I put the date in when I wanted students to be able to see an assignment. Then, I would have all the assignments in CYPHER Learning, but I wouldn't let the students see it until the day it was assigned.

I particularly like the discussions, which have been good for student engagement. Students can log in, and if we are having a discussion online, they can read everyone else's responses. They can also respond to what was said. I would have them comment on the other students' thoughts based on the discussion, and that was excellent. Organizationally, it was excellent because it is how I run my class, where all assignments are in CYPHER Learning. 

A lot of it has to do with just knowing your students and what their needs are. If I come across a student in CYPHER Learning, who is in my class, then I can grade according to whatever their specific needs are. I can help them in a class according to what their needs are.

Once you get your class set up in CYPHER Learning, you can reuse assignments or go to the library and find assignments. Once everything is in CYPHER Learning, you can reuse it, which is awesome.

I like the survey, quiz, and discussion features. The grading program is pretty good too. I do a lot of essays in my class. So, I will have prompts where students need to think critically about a reading, then they must write an essay about it. So, they are writing essays in CYPHER Learning, then I am grading them in CYPHER Learning. That is super helpful. This is why the discussion, quizzes, and surveys are super helpful, and probably the assignments that I give the most often.

Another feature that I like is having one class with three child classes. When I assign it to my parent class, then it gets assigned to all my child classes. All my students do the same assignments, but I might modify how I grade the assignment according to their needs.

It is easy for educators to communicate with students using CYPHER Learning. Students often message me through CYPHER Learning. Also, I can comment on students' assignments, then they are able to respond to the comment that I put in CYPHER Learning. There is an email feature. So, if a student sends me a comment, then I also get an email about it, which is also helpful. It is important for teachers and students to have dialogue regarding expectations. Also, students can ask questions about assignments and I can clarify information for students.

One thing that has been a problem is that CYPHER Learning doesn't save the students' work while they are doing it. For example, if you are on a Google Doc, and you close your Google Doc, then you come back, the work that you did has been saved. However, in CYPHER Learning, if for some reason the student clicks out of CYPHER Learning and goes back in, whatever they typed isn't saved. That is an area that they need to improve. A lot of my students may write an essay, but if they are two paragraphs in and their iPad crashes or something, when they go back, they are like, "All my work is gone." So, this would be an area that I would recommend for improvement in CYPHER Learning. It needs to auto save, and it doesn't auto save. That is definitely a weakness.

I have been using it for four years.

For four years, the stability has been good.

Our entire district uses CYPHER Learning. As far as that goes, it is good. Also, it is nice having a library where people save stuff and see what other people are doing.

There are approximately 1,500 teachers and 13,000 to 14,000 students who are using CYPHER Learning.

The product is being extensively used district-wide.

If I had questions, I was able to get my questions answered. We were able to give feedback to CYPHER LEARNING about different questions or features. CYPHER LEARNING was usually able to address whatever the questions or issues were, which was helpful. The auto saving thing is something that hasn't been addressed that I am aware of. So, that is an ongoing issue that hasn't been resolved.

I would give the technical support nine out of 10. Usually, they get back to me pretty quickly with a solution, for whatever the issue was.

Positive

Prior to CYPHER Learning, we didn't have an online solution. It was just old school.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. If I can learn it, anyone can learn it.

It is pretty intuitive. You need to set up your lessons. Since you will need to set them up somewhere, I feel like CYPHER Learning was pretty intuitive as far as what I needed to do as far as setting it up.

Any way you slice it, you will need to prepare your lessons. So, it doesn't take any longer in CYPHER Learning than it would any other way. It is a lot easier to have all your stuff in one place than to have a million papers flying around as well as having to grade papers. Having it all online is definitely better.

We have one tech coach at our school. If you have a tech question, you can go and ask them, then they will figure it out and help you. Anytime you do something new, you need professional development and training. So, we have tech coaches who help people to implement. So, if you are new, you can ask questions of the tech coach. 

The tech coach piece is good, providing ongoing support for teachers while they are implementing. That is a tip that is good protocol. That way, people aren't getting frustrated with it. At first, certain teachers didn't really like the grading thing. They were like, "Oh, I like Easy Grade Pro, and I want it to be Easy Grade Pro." I am like, "It's not like Easy Grade Pro, so just get over it."

When I do a survey, CYPHER Learning is helpful because then I can more quickly peruse students' responses. I don't have to go through question by question. Grading-wise, it has certainly helped, when giving a survey, to streamline my grading for that assignment.

I am sure there was some type of analysis that went into choosing CYPHER Learning. However, in the end, when the district selected CYPHER Learning, everyone was happy with it.

There is not much gamifying through CYPHER Learning. I do a lot of other activities in my class through other solutions, like Blooket, Quizizz, and Kahoot!. That is how I do gamification in my classroom.

Overall, it is a good learning management system and provides a good way to organize your class.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. The auto-save thing is the reason why they are not getting 10 out of 10.