CYPHER Learning Reviews

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.

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.