CYPHER Learning Reviews

I run an e-learning business providing training to accounting firms, and I use it as a platform for managing the learner experience for all of the learning courses. They're all self-paced courses.

We've been doing training for about 15 years, and the transition to a self-paced platform has been fantastic. It's actually given us better results with our learners than the live sessions that we were previously running. It has also allowed us to leverage and scale our business effectively and has been critically important for the growth of our business.

There are so many valuable features: The

• structure of the platform is fantastic 
• learner experience is very good
• process for the assessment of tasks works very well and that is an important part of what we do, to make sure learners get good feedback and that they can act on that feedback.
• feedback process is good as well. I get feedback from all my learners on how they're doing and they generally find the platform pretty easy to work through.

I use rules for a particular action when a particular task is completed. Gamification is a good example within that part of the platform. When learners reach a certain stage, or there's a certain outcome, they either get a certificate or a badge or the like. And when learners haven't accessed their course for a period of time, they get an automatic email asking them how things are going. Those are some basic actions or reactions around particular things that learners might do.

I am able to see who has not accessed the portal, using CYPHER Learning, and follow up with those people. This ability is very important and I have a person working full-time on it. It's our goal to make sure that learners complete their courses and we use the reporting and the platform to keep an eye on all of our learners. It doesn't lead directly to new registrations, but the learner experience is the most important thing for me. I'm keen to ensure that we give our learners all the support they can get to complete their courses.

Overall, for monitoring and checking student progress it's fantastic. It has everything that I need. I can print out reports showing me where learners are at, what their scores are, and how long it has been since they last accessed the platform. All that information is available.

The platform is fine. Most of the room for improvement is around my course design, the video content, and the structure of my courses so that they're more engaging and interactive. Whether the platform can help me deliver those outcomes, I'm not sure, but that will probably be my core focus over the next 12 months.

I have been using CYPHER Learning for three or four years.

There has been no problem with the stability. I have never had any issues.

The scalability is up to me. The intention of getting a platform like this was to scale up my business, and that's something I'm working on at the moment. I can keep doing that, it's highly leverageable.

I have 1,500 learners, of which 500 would be engaged over the course of a month. Sometimes people go off a course for a period of time and come back to it.

The responsiveness of their help desk is absolutely fantastic. If I have a question, I'll usually get a response within five minutes. That's very important to me because I've probably got over 500 learners at any one time and there are always little things that need to be addressed. They respond very quickly. 

And I'm continually improving our system with feedback from the people at CYPHER LEARNING.

Positive

CYPHER Learning was my first experience with an online e-learning platform. I did spend six months starting to develop my own platform and then stopped very quickly when I realized that there were platforms available.

I can't tell you how I came across the solution, probably just through an online search. They were very easy to engage with and that's probably why I'm with them.

The implementation was very easy. It was easy to convert some of my live content into self-paced online courses. The initial deployment was done within a month, to have it set up properly, make sure it was all working, and understand how the platform worked.

My implementation strategy involved making sure that the live content I had was transferable to a self-paced learning environment, and getting some learner feedback on how the course was operating.

Deployment of a new course, getting it set up on CYPHER Learning, takes about a day. There is very little maintenance. Once it's set up, there are only little fine-tuning things to do. I've got about 25 to 30 courses online now and I know how to set up new courses. Most of the effort is the background work, creating the content.

I only used the CYPHER LEARNING people to help with the training. In the very early days, I even had the international CEO, Graham Glass, speak to me for an hour and give me some feedback. He went through it all with me. That was quite incredible actually.

The revenue that I generate is about 50 times the cost at the moment.

For each course, it has helped to significantly reduce administrative work, but now that we've been able to scale up, obviously, we spend more time on admin in general. But we don't spend so much time on the things that we were doing in the past to manage the learner experience. Our administrative time has gone into other things that add more value.

It has also absolutely saved us money on training facilities and travel, costs that used to be involved in training. It's all online now. We have learners throughout Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, and the UK. It's scalable and people can access content anywhere.

The pricing is good. It's scalable, meaning you can start off at a cost level that is easy for a startup and then build on it from there. I've built up from nothing to a Platinum subscription. You can scale up as you need. It's pretty flexible and it works well.

If consultants or training are required, in the contract they have the ability to charge for a scope of work, but they've never charged me for anything that they've done. And they have spent significant time on some of my stuff.

I had a quick look around, but back then there weren't too many options available. 

Find out how other organizations are using it. Get as much feedback on best practices as you can. And that's not just for this platform, but for other e-learning platforms. Get feedback on how to get the most value from them. Training and understanding of e-learning platforms, and the psychology of e-learning, are particularly important so that the courses are set up correctly. Ask as many questions as you have. They're pretty responsive.

I'm just working at the moment on gamification and getting that up and running, so I can't give a lot of feedback about that, but that's developing. I'm also putting another key element of the platform into place, mastery, which is developing core competencies around course content. Similarly, I have been implementing competency-based learning over the last month or so. CYPHER Learning have given me a fair amount of detail, training, and follow-up on that. Again, I can't give a lot of feedback, but it all works fairly well.

We're also in the process of implementing two-factor authentication for security. That has been up and running over the last month and we are getting our learners through that process at the moment, so that data and information are secure. That is a key project that we're working on, apart from gamification and competencies.

I don't have any complaints about the platform. At this stage, it's meeting my needs. My challenge is more in making sure that I'm using it to its full capabilities. For that reason, I'm in pretty regular contact with the people at CYPHER Learning to review where I'm at and identify what I could be doing better. I'm focusing on continual improvement.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the platform is the need to keep refining and developing. There are always things that you don't know. There are always features of a platform like this that you're not aware of. It's important to always be looking for ways to improve and asking whether the platform can deliver those outcomes. The platform has a pretty healthy pipeline, and they'll generally listen to any suggestions.

We use it for teaching online.

The students have begun to use the platform, above all, because it also allows them to join libraries instead of searching for bibliographic references on Google. They make use of the libraries and that has facilitated academic activity. That is an area that has been exploited effectively in our university.

CYPHER Learning has saved us time on intervention strategies for students, especially those who need guidance. It has saved us approximately 30 percent compared to other methods, especially because of how intuitive the platform is.

Another benefit is the time saved on administrative work, such as grades, filling out reports, and student control. Having these things automated instead of doing them manually results in very considerable time savings. If I did those things manually in half an hour, with CYPHER Learning I do them in five minutes.

It also saves on printing costs. It enables you to do everything in a digital format. You prepare something, put it in a PDF, and send it by email. It makes things much easier for you.

We use it mostly as a repository for study materials, the tasks to be carried out,  and to allow students to publish their documents, the area of ​​qualifications, and feedback.

One of the features that is very good is the automation for setting trigger rules that show or hide specific class sections or assignments. We have it based on mosaics and it is very intuitive. We immediately find what we want. What we call "Unit Zero" is where the manuals, et cetera are located. Each unit, in turn, has another group of mosaics where units and tasks are broken down.

The adaptive learning for providing students with personalized content based on their goals and performance is also good. Because I started in online education two years ago, I am very used to it.

One area that needs improvement is the feedback box. In our case, the space  for it is in the right-hand menu but with little margin width. That makes it very difficult for us to fully visualize what we are writing. It would be a great help if they would give us 150 points of width to effectively see the area where we are writing.

Also, I would like to see better integration of the platform with Zoom or Meet so that programming of video conferences would be much more interactive within those platforms. Currently, if we have to do a conference in Zoom or Meet, we have to leave the platform because we cannot do so directly within it.

Another point for improvement is the integration with other platforms, especially because students and teachers are already familiar with other platforms. Sometimes, they have a lot of material in one of those other platforms and when integrating it with CYPHER Learning, the formats and instructions do not match, and that can affect their performance levels. Integration with other file-sharing platforms needs to be exploited.

I have been using CYPHER Learning for about three years.

So far, my impression of its stability has been positive. There have been very few crashes, and many of them have been due to internet bandwidth rather than system failures. On occasion, when refreshing the database, some content has been lost but that has been very sporadic and infrequent.

Scaling has been handled as needed, but there is still a lot to explore because it has not been used to 100 percent of its capacity. Our requirements themselves are what make us increase our use of the solution, little by little.

It is very underutilized because students limit themselves to uploading their files to it, but they do not make effective use of it because the university was designed to be face-to-face. The vast majority of students do not accept working online, except for the delivery of files. While I have experience with it and have seen many of its functions, the students are not used to it. In that sense, the platform has been very neglected.

We have approximately 6,000 people who use it, including teachers, students, academic coordinators, campus directors, managers, and site administrators. It has not decreased the number of people we need to administrate our educational center.

On the occasions that I have requested help, the response has been fast. It has taken approximately one or two hours.

Positive

This is our first such solution. Because of the pandemic, we were forced to teach classes online. Our university was designed to be 100 percent face-to-face, so the platform had to be enabled to teach classes during the pandemic.

The initial setup was complex due to its design, because it is different from other platforms. It seems complex when it is unknown, but within three hours you can learn the basics.

Our setup took about three hours. It gives us a web page with an https address and that is where the login is.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, there are three roles: one that uploads the content, one that establishes the parameters of action, and one that manages the platform.

I think it is important to maintain the 30-day trial policy. Perhaps there could be individual licenses for teachers so that they could better exploit and learn how to use the platform. If teachers were encouraged to create their own courses and given an economically attractive license, I feel that there would be an opportunity to have it used more widely. Individual teachers could be encouraged to create their own courses and not depend so much on the formal educational centers.

The ability to communicate with students using CYPHER Learning is very poor. There is a lot of ignorance about the platform, and the vast majority of our teachers were also not used to working online. Many of them do not know how to enable or disable students, how to register them, or how to modify delivery dates. That is not a problem with the platform, it is a lack of teacher training.

CYPHER Learning provides activities to help students get engaged with their learning and develop higher-order thinking skills. However, the teachers limit themselves to a series of activities that are traditional and they have not explored the richness of the features. Most do not go beyond the common essay and the forum becomes a very mechanical database. The wikis are largely forgotten because professors are not used to working this way. They have had to force themselves to teach online without knowing how to do so. Again this is a lack of teacher training, not an issue with the platform.

The gamified learning environment for helping with teaching and learning is a positive. There are areas for improvement, especially in the feedback field, but it is a matter of site design. Overall, I am very positive about the platform. You will master it in a short period of time.

It is a product that is worth it, once you learn how to handle it. There are no limits with it. On the contrary, it gives you the possibility of opening up, increasing, and deepening student learning. You can increase the type and number of activities within the platform beyond the traditional ones used in the face-to-face system.

Foreign Language: (Spanish)

¿Cuál es nuestra razón de uso principal?

Lo usamos para enseñar en línea.

¿Cómo ha ayudado a mi organización?

Los alumnos han comenzado a utilizar la plataforma, sobre todo, porque también les permite unirse a las bibliotecas en lugar de buscar referencias bibliográficas en Google. Hacen uso de las bibliotecas y eso ha facilitado la actividad académica. Esa es un área que ha sido explotada de manera efectiva en nuestra universidad.

CYPHER Learning nos ha ahorrado tiempo en estrategias de intervención para estudiantes, especialmente aquellos que necesitan orientación. Nos ha ahorrado aproximadamente un 30 por ciento en comparación con otros métodos, especialmente por lo intuitiva que es la plataforma.

Otro beneficio es el ahorro de tiempo en el trabajo administrativo, como calificaciones, llenado de informes y control de estudiantes. Tener estas cosas automatizadas en lugar de hacerlo manualmente da como resultado un ahorro de tiempo muy considerable. Si esas cosas las hacía manualmente en media hora, con CYPHER Learning las hago en cinco minutos.

También ahorra en costes de impresión. Te permite hacer todo en formato digital. Preparas algo, lo pones en un PDF y lo envías por correo electrónico. Te facilita mucho las cosas.

¿Qué es lo más valioso?

Lo usamos mayormente como repositorio de materiales de estudio, las tareas a realizar, y para permitir a los estudiantes publicar sus documentos, el área de calificaciones y retroalimentación.

Una de las características que es muy buena es la automatización para establecer reglas de activación que muestren u oculten secciones o tareas de clase específicas. Lo tenemos a base de mosaicos y es muy intuitivo. Inmediatamente encontramos lo que buscamos. Lo que llamamos "Unidad Cero" es donde se encuentran los manuales, etcétera. Cada unidad, a su vez, tiene otro grupo de mosaicos donde se desglosan unidades y tareas.

El aprendizaje adaptativo para proporcionar a los estudiantes contenido personalizado en función de sus objetivos y rendimiento también es bueno. Debido a que comencé en la educación en línea hace dos años, estoy muy acostumbrado.

¿Qué necesita mejorar?

Un área que necesita mejoras es el cuadro de comentarios. En nuestro caso, el espacio para ello está en el menú de la derecha pero con poco ancho de margen. Eso hace que sea muy difícil para nosotros visualizar completamente lo que estamos escribiendo. Sería de gran ayuda que nos dieran 150 puntos de ancho para ver efectivamente la zona donde estamos escribiendo.

Además, me gustaría ver una mejor integración de la plataforma con Zoom o Meet para que la programación de videoconferencias sea mucho más interactiva dentro de esas plataformas. Actualmente, si tenemos que hacer una conferencia en Zoom o Meet, tenemos que salir de la plataforma porque no podemos hacerlo directamente dentro de ella.

Otro punto a mejorar es la integración con otras plataformas, sobre todo porque alumnos y profesores ya están familiarizados con otras plataformas. A veces, tienen mucho material en una de esas otras plataformas y al integrarlo con CYPHER Learning, los formatos y las instrucciones no coinciden, y eso puede afectar sus niveles de rendimiento. Es necesario aprovechar la integración con otras plataformas de intercambio de archivos.

¿Por cuánto tiempo he usado la solución?

He estado usando CYPHER Learning durante unos tres años.

¿Qué pienso sobre la estabilidad de la solución?

Hasta ahora, mi impresión de su estabilidad ha sido positiva. Ha habido muy pocos bloqueos, y muchos de ellos se han debido al ancho de banda de Internet en lugar de fallas del sistema. En ocasiones al refrescar la base de datos se ha perdido algún contenido pero ha sido muy esporádico y poco frecuente.

¿Qué opino de la escalabilidad de la solución?

El escalado se ha manejado según sea necesario, pero aún queda mucho por explorar porque no se ha utilizado al 100 por ciento de su capacidad. Nuestros propios requisitos son los que nos hacen aumentar nuestro uso de la solución, poco a poco.

Está muy infrautilizado porque los estudiantes se limitan a subir sus archivos, pero no hacen un uso efectivo porque la universidad fue diseñada para ser presencial. La gran mayoría de los estudiantes no acepta trabajar en línea, excepto para la entrega de archivos. Si bien tengo experiencia con él y he visto muchas de sus funciones, los estudiantes no están acostumbrados. En ese sentido, la plataforma ha estado muy descuidada.

Contamos con aproximadamente 6,000 personas que lo utilizan, entre docentes, estudiantes, coordinadores académicos, directores de campus, gerentes y administradores de sitios. No ha disminuido el número de personas que necesitamos para administrar nuestro centro educativo.

¿Cómo son el servicio de atención al cliente y el soporte?

En las ocasiones que he solicitado ayuda la respuesta ha sido rápida. Ha tardado aproximadamente una o dos horas.

¿Cómo calificaría el servicio y soporte al cliente?

Positivo

¿Qué solución usé anteriormente y por qué cambié?

Esta es nuestra primera solución de este tipo. Debido a la pandemia, nos vimos obligados a dar clases en línea. Nuestra universidad fue diseñada para ser 100 por ciento presencial, por lo que había que habilitar la plataforma para impartir clases durante la pandemia.

¿Cómo fue la configuración inicial?

La configuración inicial fue compleja debido a su diseño, ya que es diferente a otras plataformas. Parece complejo cuando se desconoce, pero en tres horas puedes aprender lo básico.

Nuestra configuración tomó alrededor de tres horas. Nos da una página web con una dirección https y ahí es donde está el inicio de sesión.

En términos de implementación y mantenimiento, hay tres roles: uno que carga el contenido, uno que establece los parámetros de acción y otro que administra la plataforma.

¿Cuál es mi experiencia con los precios, el costo de configuración y las licencias?

Creo que es importante mantener la política de prueba de 30 días. Quizás podría haber licencias individuales para los docentes para que puedan explotar mejor y aprender a usar la plataforma. Si se animara a los profesores a crear sus propios cursos y se les diera una licencia económicamente atractiva, creo que habría una oportunidad de que se utilizara más ampliamente. Se podría alentar a los maestros individuales a crear sus propios cursos y no depender tanto de los centros educativos formales.

¿Qué otro consejo tengo?

La capacidad de comunicarse con los estudiantes que usan CYPHER Learning es muy pobre. Hay mucho desconocimiento sobre la plataforma, y la gran mayoría de nuestros profesores tampoco estaban acostumbrados a trabajar en línea. Muchos de ellos no saben cómo habilitar o deshabilitar alumnos, cómo darlos de alta, o cómo modificar las fechas de entrega. Eso no es problema de la plataforma, es falta de formación de los profesores.

CYPHER Learning ofrece actividades para ayudar a los estudiantes a participar en su aprendizaje y desarrollar habilidades de pensamiento de orden superior. Sin embargo, los docentes se limitan a una serie de actividades que son tradicionales y no han explorado la riqueza de las características. La mayoría no va más allá del ensayo común y el foro se convierte en una base de datos muy mecánica. Los wikis están en gran parte olvidados porque los profesores no están acostumbrados a trabajar de esta manera. Se han tenido que obligar a enseñar en línea sin saber cómo hacerlo. Nuevamente, esto es una falta de capacitación de los maestros, no un problema con la plataforma.

El entorno de aprendizaje gamificado para ayudar con la enseñanza y el aprendizaje es positivo. Hay áreas de mejora, especialmente en el campo de la retroalimentación, pero es una cuestión de diseño del sitio. En general, soy muy positivo acerca de la plataforma. Lo dominarás en un corto período de tiempo.

Es un producto que merece la pena, una vez que aprendes a manejarlo. No hay límites con eso. Por el contrario, te da la posibilidad de abrir, incrementar y profundizar el aprendizaje de los estudiantes. Puedes aumentar el tipo y número de actividades dentro de la plataforma más allá de las tradicionales utilizadas en el sistema presencial.

Spaces are created for our subjects and courses and each teacher manages things according to their needs. I try to make content and sources of activities and actions that can be carried out by linking with other applications and I configure the grading aspect as well.

It has helped to make the relationship between the teacher and the student transparent in different ways. First of all, it allows the student and the teacher to know what progress the student has made. Second, in addition to the grading system, there are charts that both teachers and students can see, indicating the student's performance and their grades.

Transparency is one of the valuable aspects of the platform. I can be very transparent with students, both in terms of advancement in the subject and the production of knowledge. That is especially true in the areas of evaluations, qualifications, the possibilities for feedback and for corrections. That seems very important to me. CYPHER Learning gives me that ability and, in some cases, it motivates me to do extra work. Take, for example, a relatively mechanical quiz. Because there is an opportunity to give feedback, it makes it less mechanical and lets the students know where they were wrong and what the teacher's impression is. That seems important to me.

It has also allowed the incorporation of new tools linked to the platform. It is a day-to-day tool for me. Each step I take in the subject, whether it is virtual or face-to-face, has a corresponding feature in CYPHER Learning.

We're going through the pandemic and, with the confinement and quarantines, and even when there is a local outbreak, CYPHER Learning allows us to quickly turn to virtual education. We're embracing a type of hybrid education, and that has been fundamental during the pandemic.

It also allows me to have a source of reference for what is happening during the semester. It gives us a single record of face-to-face and virtual interactions, making it a more solid reference.

Another benefit is that it has helped save time on intervention strategies for students, especially those who need guidance. It has made that quite easy for me in particular cases. The fact that I can retrieve material from a library and upload it adaptively has saved me a lot of time and allows me to adapt to the situation.

The fact that the students have a point of reference on the platform means that classes are not fragmented. The platform allows the teacher to unify activities by focusing their students on instructions or content or activities. It creates pretty solid points of reference about the students.

It's also great that you don't have to print things. CYPHER Learning is not the only solution with this ability, as other applications allow you to do so. But we can link them with CYPHER Learning and that’s also good. The university has also included access to the international libraries and this means that students are not looking just anywhere for information but, instead, use these libraries. As a result, there have indeed been many cost savings. I prefer that students do work virtually instead of printing it.

Compared to other platforms, it is very user-friendly and intuitive, and both teachers and students can easily find what they need and use the functions without extensive training. Obviously, you need a minimum introduction to the system. 

There are a lot of built-in functionalities and many more functions than we use, things that we would need to know in detail.

In terms of automation, I have dedicated myself to doing tests or qualifications in a more automated way, but I have not delved into other things.

CYPHER Learning provides a variety of activities to help with student engagement. There are some students who are very limited when it comes to what the teacher offers them from the platform, but there are other students who exploit the resources of the platform quite well. Due to the lack of skills of some students in my country, there is no possibility of exploiting everything.

It allows the integration of different pedagogical approaches. While it is true that we cannot speak of a completely virtual scenario yet, what has been done instead is an adaptation from face-to-face to virtual. Many teachers have tried to recreate their face-to-face format, mediated by virtuality, and CYPHER Learning has been a source of material and of recorded and published classes. 

Some teachers have used other approaches, such as using the collaborative aspects that CYPHER Learning makes possible. That way, learning is not only via a shared class with explanations, but also includes activities that enable building and learning via collaboration. This is a leap that virtual education allows us. From my point of view, CYPHER Learning has both participatory and collaborative tools and this seems like a very good combination to me. It does not have everything, and it is true that there could be more applications adapted and included.

I wanted to use it as a source of communication with students, but that didn't work out very well. It is easy for educators to communicate with students, but CYPHER Learning is constituted as a formal communication tool. It shows what students and teachers say to each other, but for non-formal, practical notices, dialogues, and questions about what people did not understand, they use WhatsApp or Telegram a lot more. 

At the level of daily communications, CYPHER Learning is not the tool they use. It is only used for things like requesting permission or communicating with the whole class. The type of communication we have is quite horizontal in general, so there is a lot of non-formal communication, and that personal communication between the students and teachers is normally via WhatsApp or Telegram.

I would like to see an improvement in peer-bonding and the possibility for students to share knowledge among themselves regarding the work that they do. That would greatly help in that it wouldn’t be a one-to-many communication format. 

Another possibility would be incorporating additional applications to expand the functionalities of the platform. I don't know if they exist or not because I don't have administrator privileges, but that could be interesting.

Also, teachers do not have privileges compared to other platforms. We cannot connect applications that allow us to tune LMS or enhance it much.

Another point is that there are some jobs or tasks that cannot be seen by everybody. If someone submits jobs, I can see them but students do not have that possibility, or at least I have not discovered it.

I have been using CYPHER Learning for a year and a half to two years.

I have never had any problem with its availability. I know that there are students who have experienced problems that were linked to their browsers or to the internet access they had. But no problem has ever arisen with the platform itself. It has always worked quite well.

As an institution, we haven't tested the scalability extensively. We are a university with headquarters in four cities and the distance between them is 400 kilometers. CYPHER Learning has given us the opportunity to have a single subject with a single teacher who works in a given location and that has been a form of scalability that did not exist before. We call it "inter-branching."

We have about 20,000 students and about 2,000 teachers as well as another 500 people who are linked to other services who are probably using it. I don't know exactly how many users we have.

The university offers us this platform and all teachers and students are linked to it. Each one takes advantage of it in a different way. In certain cases and specific situations, other platforms are still used and they are not always linked to CYPHER Learning. There are teachers who prefer using other platforms for certain things.

I have never used the technical support but it is done via the platform, either face-to-face, in a phone call, or through a WhatsApp chat. From what I understand, they usually respond very quickly.

Positive

I have worked with other platforms, so when I saw CYPHER Learning it was very intuitive for me and I had no problems. It is necessary to invest a little time to understand certain modalities, but it is simple and friendly, once you know the environment.

It took me a couple of weeks to configure the essential things, while the more complex things took months.

As part of our implementation strategy, our university did three things. First, it called a local expert who was not from the institution or from CYPHER Learning, and he did the initial training. There was another training round for the teachers that went a little deeper, helping them to investigate and use the tool, especially in the field of evaluation. Finally, there was a course organized by an Argentine university that uses CYPHER Learning for pedagogical strategies.

We used an integrator at the beginning and a consultant later. Some of the training was more technical, about use of the platform itself and how it works. Other sessions were more about how to exploit it pedagogically. They were two different aspects but both were very helpful.

The consultant was a representative of the Catholic University of Salta in Argentina who gave us the more pedagogical aspects related to CYPHER Learning.

If we compare CYPHER Learning with Modul, the latter is free but the problem is that the amount of time one must dedicate to the configuration of its tools is considerable. When you translate that time into money, it has economic weight. With CYPHER Learning, everything is ready, making it simple to use without having too many deep configurations or requirements for knowledge of languages or programming.

I don't know how much CYPHER Learning costs, but if you have the budget, it is worth it.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we used a platform called Modul, which is open source, but it was less user-friendly for everyone. We also had a platform called Classroom but everything was a bit fragmented. CYPHER Learning has allowed us to unify all the teachers' and students' tasks in a single platform.

I have also used a paid platform called Docent, but with CYPHER Learning I have access to local platforms built by universities.

There are some other free online platforms and one where you have a trial version and then you can upgrade to a paid version and receive more tools. But it was very dedicated to the educational side, meaning the broadcasting of content and activities, but had very little in the way of evaluation or administrative management. In that sense, it did not provide the support we needed.

In the end, our university made CYPHER Learning the only official platform. Even if it hadn’t been mandatory, I would have chosen it anyway.

When it comes to competency-based learning I do not know if it is fully enabled in our case. I can see that the students have badges or awards, and when they have been outstanding in one subject or another, but I have not been able to see a record of the student's performance. It is likely that it is not enabled.

In terms of the staff needed to manage the LMS, we have had to dispense with some functions and enable other functions. Some administrative management has been decreased, but the level of technical support for students and teachers has increased. Some people have had to assume the roles of technological and pedagogical advisors, while others have been able to reduce their involvement in qualifications because those processes are more automatic.

It is a fairly complete product that not only allows you to manage content and educational activities but also to manage things administratively. You can create learning communities, and it enables you to link many tools. There are also many options for accessing libraries in one place. It is suitable for a university. Other educational institutions may find it too big.

Overall, it is quite good and has the essentials.

Foreign Language:(Spanish)

¿Cuál es nuestra razón de uso principal?

Se crean espacios para nuestras asignaturas y cursos y cada profesor gestiona las cosas según sus necesidades. Intento crear contenido y fuentes de actividades y acciones que se puedan realizar mediante la vinculación con otras aplicaciones y también configurar el aspecto de calificación.

¿Cómo ha ayudado a mi organización?

Ha ayudado a que la relación entre el profesor y el alumno sea transparente de diferentes maneras. En primer lugar, permite al alumno y al profesor saber qué progreso ha realizado el alumno. En segundo lugar, además del sistema de calificación, hay gráficos que tanto los profesores como los estudiantes pueden ver, que indican el desempeño del estudiante y sus calificaciones.

La transparencia es uno de los aspectos valiosos de la plataforma. Puedo ser muy transparente con los estudiantes, tanto en términos de avance en el tema como en la producción de conocimiento. Eso es especialmente cierto en las áreas de evaluaciones, calificaciones, las posibilidades de retroalimentación y correcciones. Eso me parece muy importante. CYPHER Learning me da esa capacidad y, en algunos casos, me motiva a hacer un trabajo extra. Tomemos, por ejemplo, un cuestionario relativamente mecánico. Debido a que existe la oportunidad de dar retroalimentación, lo hace menos mecánico y les permite a los estudiantes saber dónde se equivocaron y cuál es la impresión del maestro. Eso me parece importante.

También ha permitido la incorporación de nuevas herramientas vinculadas a la plataforma. Es una herramienta para mi día a día. Cada paso que doy en la materia, ya sea virtual o presencial, tiene una característica correspondiente en CYPHER Learning.

Estamos pasando por la pandemia y con el confinamiento y las cuarentenas, e incluso cuando hay un brote local, CYPHER Learning nos permite pasar rápidamente a la educación virtual. Estamos adoptando un tipo de educación híbrida, y eso ha sido fundamental durante la pandemia.

También me permite tener una fuente de referencia de lo que está pasando durante el semestre. Nos brinda un registro único de las interacciones presenciales y virtuales, lo que lo convierte en una referencia más sólida.

Otro beneficio es que ha ayudado a ahorrar tiempo en las estrategias de intervención para los estudiantes, especialmente para aquellos que necesitan orientación. Me lo ha facilitado bastante en casos particulares. El hecho de que pueda recuperar material de una biblioteca y cargarlo de forma adaptativa me ha ahorrado mucho tiempo y me permite adaptarme a la situación.

El hecho de que los alumnos tengan un punto de referencia en la plataforma hace que las clases no se fragmenten. La plataforma permite al docente unificar actividades enfocando a sus alumnos en instrucciones o contenidos o actividades. Crea puntos de referencia bastante sólidos sobre los estudiantes.

También es genial que no tengas que imprimir cosas. CYPHER Learning no es la única solución con esta capacidad, ya que otras aplicaciones te permiten hacerlo. Pero podemos vincularlos con CYPHER Learning y eso también es bueno. La universidad también ha incluido el acceso a las bibliotecas internacionales y esto significa que los estudiantes no buscan información en cualquier lugar, sino que utilizan estas bibliotecas. Como resultado, ha habido muchos ahorros de costos. Prefiero que los alumnos hagan el trabajo virtualmente en lugar de imprimirlo.

¿Qué es lo más valioso?

En comparación con otras plataformas, es muy fácil de usar e intuitiva, y tanto los profesores como los estudiantes pueden encontrar fácilmente lo que necesitan y utilizar las funciones sin tener una gran formación. Obviamente, necesitas una mínima introducción al sistema.

Hay un montón de funcionalidades integradas y muchas más funciones de las que usamos, cosas que necesitamos saber en detalle.

En cuanto a la automatización me he dedicado a hacer pruebas o calificaciones de forma más automatizada, pero no he profundizado en otras cosas.

CYPHER Learning ofrece una variedad de actividades para ayudar con la participación de los estudiantes. Hay algunos alumnos que se limitan en cuanto a lo que el profesor les ofrece desde la plataforma, pero hay otros alumnos que aprovechan bastante bien los recursos de la plataforma. Debido a la falta de habilidades de algunos estudiantes en mi país, no hay posibilidad de explotarlo todo.

Permite la integración de diferentes enfoques pedagógicos. Si bien es cierto que todavía no podemos hablar de un escenario completamente virtual, lo que se ha hecho en cambio es una adaptación de lo presencial a lo virtual. Muchos docentes han intentado recrear su formato presencial, mediado por la virtualidad, y CYPHER Learning ha sido fuente de material y de clases grabadas y publicadas.

Algunos profesores han utilizado otros enfoques, como el uso de los aspectos colaborativos que hace posible CYPHER Learning. De esa manera, el aprendizaje no es solo a través de una clase compartida con explicaciones, sino que también incluye actividades que permiten construir y aprender a través de la colaboración. Este es un salto que nos permite la educación virtual. Desde mi punto de vista, CYPHER Learning tiene herramientas tanto participativas como colaborativas y esta me parece una muy buena combinación. No lo tiene todo, y es cierto que podría haber más aplicaciones adaptadas e incluidas.

¿Qué necesita mejorar?

Quería usarlo como una fuente de comunicación con los estudiantes, pero eso no funcionó muy bien. Es fácil para los educadores comunicarse con los estudiantes, pero CYPHER Learning se constituye como una herramienta de comunicación formal. Muestra lo que se dicen alumnos y profesores, pero para avisos no formales, prácticos, diálogos y preguntas sobre lo que la gente no entendió, usan mucho más WhatsApp o Telegram.

A nivel de comunicaciones diarias, CYPHER Learning no es la herramienta que utilizan. Solo se usa para cosas como solicitar permiso o comunicarse con toda la clase. El tipo de comunicación que tenemos es bastante horizontal en general, por lo que hay mucha comunicación no formal, y esa comunicación personal entre alumnos y profesores es normalmente vía WhatsApp o Telegram.

Me gustaría ver una mejora en la vinculación entre pares y la posibilidad de que los estudiantes compartan conocimientos entre ellos sobre el trabajo que realizan. Eso sería de gran ayuda ya que no sería un formato de comunicación de uno a muchos.

Otra posibilidad sería incorporar aplicaciones adicionales para ampliar las funcionalidades de la plataforma. No sé si existen o no porque no tengo privilegios de administrador, pero eso podría ser interesante.

Además, los profesores no tienen privilegios en comparación con otras plataformas. No podemos conectar aplicaciones que nos permitan afinar LMS o potenciarlo mucho.

Otro punto es que hay algunos trabajos o tareas que no todos pueden ver. Si alguien envía trabajos, puedo verlos pero los estudiantes no tienen esa posibilidad, o al menos yo no la he descubierto.

¿Por cuánto tiempo he usado la plataforma?

He estado usando CYPHER Learning durante un año y medio o dos años.

¿Qué pienso sobre la estabilidad de la solución?

Nunca he tenido ningún problema con su disponibilidad. Sé que hay estudiantes que han tenido problemas que estaban relacionados con sus navegadores o con el acceso a Internet que tenían. Pero nunca ha surgido ningún problema con la plataforma en sí. Siempre ha funcionado bastante bien.

¿Qué opino de la escalabilidad de la solución?

Como institución, no hemos probado la escalabilidad de forma exhaustiva. Somos una universidad con sede en cuatro ciudades y la distancia entre ellas es de 400 kilómetros. CYPHER Learning nos ha dado la oportunidad de tener una sola asignatura con un solo profesor que trabaja en un lugar determinado y eso ha sido una forma de escalabilidad que antes no existía. Lo llamamos "interramificación".

Tenemos unos 20.000 alumnos y unos 2.000 profesores además de otras 500 personas que están vinculadas a otros servicios que probablemente lo estén utilizando. No sé exactamente cuántos usuarios tenemos.

La universidad nos ofrece esta plataforma y todos los profesores y alumnos están vinculados a ella. Cada uno lo aprovecha de una manera diferente. En determinados casos y situaciones específicas, se siguen utilizando otras plataformas y no siempre están vinculadas a CYPHER Learning. Hay profesores que prefieren usar otras plataformas para ciertas cosas.

¿Cómo son el servicio de atención al cliente y el soporte?

Nunca he utilizado el soporte técnico pero se hace a través de la plataforma, ya sea presencial, en una llamada telefónica o a través de un chat de WhatsApp. Por lo que entiendo, suelen responder muy rápido.

¿Cómo calificaría el servicio y soporte al cliente?

Positivo.

¿Cómo fue la configuración inicial?

He trabajado con otras plataformas, así que cuando vi CYPHER Learning me resultó muy intuitivo y no tuve problemas. Es necesario invertir un poco de tiempo para entender ciertas modalidades, pero es sencillo y amigable, una vez que conoces el entorno.

Me llevó un par de semanas configurar las cosas esenciales, mientras que las cosas más complejas me llevaron meses.

Como parte de nuestra estrategia de implementación, nuestra universidad hizo tres cosas. Primero llamó a un experto local que no era de la institución ni de CYPHER Learning, y él hizo la capacitación inicial. Hubo otra ronda de formación para los profesores que profundizó un poco más, ayudándoles a investigar y utilizar la herramienta, especialmente en el ámbito de la evaluación. Finalmente, hubo un curso organizado por una universidad argentina que utiliza CYPHER Learning para estrategias pedagógicas.

¿Y el equipo de implementación?

Utilizamos un integrador al principio y un consultor después. Parte de la capacitación fue más técnica, sobre el uso de la plataforma en sí y cómo funciona. Otras sesiones fueron más sobre cómo explotarlo pedagógicamente. Eran dos aspectos diferentes, pero ambos fueron muy útiles.

El consultor fue un representante de la Universidad Católica de Salta en Argentina quien nos brindó los aspectos más pedagógicos relacionados con CYPHER Learning.

¿Cuál es mi experiencia con los precios, el costo de configuración y las licencias?

Si comparamos CYPHER Learning con Modul, Modul es gratuito pero el problema es que la cantidad de tiempo que hay que dedicar a la configuración de sus herramientas es considerable. Cuando traduces ese tiempo en dinero, tiene un peso económico. Con CYPHER Learning, todo está listo, lo que facilita su uso sin tener demasiadas configuraciones profundas o requisitos de conocimiento de lenguajes o programación.

No sé cuánto cuesta CYPHER Learning, pero si tienes el presupuesto, vale la pena.

¿Qué otras soluciones evalué?

Al comienzo de la pandemia, usábamos una plataforma llamada Modul, que es de código abierto, pero era menos fácil de usar para todos. También teníamos una plataforma llamada Classroom pero todo estaba un poco fragmentado. CYPHER Learning nos ha permitido unificar todas las tareas de profesores y alumnos en una única plataforma.

También he usado una plataforma paga llamada Docent, pero con CYPHER Learning tengo acceso a plataformas locales construidas por universidades.

Hay algunas otras plataformas en línea gratuitas y una de ellas tenía una versión de prueba y luego puedes actualizar a una versión paga y recibir más herramientas. estaba muy dedicada a la vertiente educativa, es decir, a la difusión de contenidos y actividades, pero tenía muy poco en cuanto a evaluación o gestión administrativa. En ese sentido, no proporcionó el apoyo que necesitábamos.

Al final, nuestra universidad convirtió a CYPHER Learning en la única plataforma oficial. Incluso si no hubiera sido obligatorio, lo habría elegido de todos modos.

¿Qué otro consejo tengo?

Cuando se trata de aprendizaje basado en competencias, no sé si está completamente habilitado en nuestro caso. Puedo ver que los alumnos tienen insignias o premios, y cuando se han destacado en una materia u otra, pero no he podido ver un registro del rendimiento del alumno. Es probable que no esté habilitado.

En cuanto al personal necesario para gestionar el LMS, hemos tenido que prescindir de algunas funciones y habilitar otras funciones. Se ha disminuido parte de la gestión administrativa, pero se ha incrementado el nivel de soporte técnico para estudiantes y profesores. Algunas personas han tenido que asumir roles de asesores tecnológicos y pedagógicos, mientras que otras han podido reducir su participación en las calificaciones porque esos procesos son más automáticos.

Es un producto bastante completo que no solo te permite gestionar contenidos y actividades educativas sino también gestionar cosas administrativamente. Puede crear comunidades de aprendizaje y te permite vincular muchas herramientas. También hay muchas opciones para acceder a las bibliotecas en un solo lugar. Es adecuado para una universidad. Otros tipos de instituciones educativas pueden encontrarlo demasiado grande.

En general, es bastante bueno y tiene lo esencial.

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.

I love their help center. 

I just love the accessibility of being able to edit all the courses at once by editing the master course. 

I love the catalog feature. 

I love the support. 

They have gamification elements, and I love the gamification. We can add points to student assessments. We can also add badges, so students can earn badges. This makes them more motivated to continue learning. 

We can create certificates. There are student portfolios that schools love. Students can have a portfolio of all these credentials and badges that they have earned over their educational journey. 

We can see who has accessed the portal, if they are using it, and the student's progress. We schedule check-ins, where we can say, "Hey, we see you haven't been able to look at the courses yet or log in. Is there anything that is holding you back?" 

I have one team member who is in charge of monitoring and checking students' progress. She is very tech savvy and has really dove into the reporting feature in CYPHER Learning. If I had one complaint, it would be the reporting. It is so robust and detailed that it is hard to obtain some of the specific things that we want. That has been her response to me, and I have found the same thing. If I just want to know how many students have completed a course in a specific organization, then it is a little bit too daunting and difficult to obtain exactly what we use as our key indicators.

We transitioned over to CYPHER Learning in 2020. 

It is very stable. 

This is deployed in the cloud. We have five to seven employees who actually go into the software, but we all access it remotely and it is all online in the cloud.

It can grow with us. We have gone from 150 users a month to 1,000 users every month in the matter of six months, and we are getting even bigger. We will probably have 10,000 users every month by the end of the year.  We currently have 6,500 instructors, administrators, and students using the solution. We are getting about 1,000 to 1,100 more students every month.

I am very confident that the solution can be scaled. It does scale very well.

There is someone from IT, implementation, and curriculum always engaged in the platform. So, we have an IT Manager and Implementation Manager as well as a Director of Curriculum who assists with walk-throughs.

It is used all day, every day, by various members of our team. It is used all day during the school hours across the country. We are also looking to expand into Jamaica and Puerto Rico, so we will be international soon. We are adding new districts every other month. So, we have plans to extend our usage.

The support system on CYPHER Learning is one of its best features. I love the program because they get back to you quickly, and they are knowledgeable.

They have taken my suggestions and changed elements of the LMS to make things easier. In a matter of a week, I make a suggestion and their engineers create the change. There are a lot of little things like that which attracted us to do a trial, remain their client, and use the solution. This really helps my workflow.

I speak very highly of their support system, i.e., the help center. Their documentation is great. The help center is easy to follow for finding answers to my questions. The support team answers 24/7, though only on critical items during the weekends. 

I love the idea of the suggestions. They are very transparent about their roadmap. All of that falls under the support system. I am very pleased with the support system and would rate it as 10 out of 10.

Positive

I had several complaints about the Moodle Workplace. With our previous LMS, I had to update every course individually with new changes. We serve hundreds of school districts across the country. Every school has multiple schools, every school has multiple teachers, and teachers have multiple copies of the course for their different sections of classes. Therefore, Moodle was not working out.

We serve schools and school districts, and we provide STEM-related STEM online courses to school districts and other community student serving organizations, i.e., anybody who serves students. We needed a way to translate the courses somewhat quickly, then update the courses across all our tenants or different clients.

Because of COVID, we really needed a new solution for our multi-tenant LMS. We were using Moodle Workplace previously, which just wasn't working out. The CEO found CYPHER Learning somehow, and it has been amazing ever since.

We looked at the different features that CYPHER Learning offered. It had gamification, which is also something that we wanted to do and Moodle couldn't do. It had the syncing feature, where I could update one course and sync it across every course that I have ever made. Also, it works with language. It could translate into 40-plus languages. So, it seemed like this solution was a much better use case for us.

The onboarding was quite complex since there is so much you can do. There are so many features that can be used. We were guided to do things that were essential, e.g., creating organizations, creating accounts, managing accounts, creating courses, and editing courses. That was all very straightforward. I could actually figure it out before we even got to the onboarding, so we were able to focus on more complex, different things than onboarding.

We spaced the deployment out over three weeks, working on it once a week, so we were able to have time in between the practice to learn different things. We may have even expanded that because we needed to have a client come in pretty quickly. 

CYPHER Learning has helped reduce our administrative work and costs when delivering training material.

If we were still in Moodle, it would be a lot harder for companies to join us. I don't think that they would feel as confident. That has definitely been a return on investment from using CYPHER Learning. 

We are on a plan where we pay for 1,000 users every month. The pricing structure is pretty straightforward. It just depends on what you need. We are currently going with a monthly model because sometimes there are still months during the year where we will have a lot less students on the system, and we took that into consideration. 

I would advise to ask about reseller options since they have reseller options for other organizations to use their LMS.

The more users you get a month, the more you will pay. If you go over your plan, there is an additional $6 per user. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to jump to the next plan because you wouldn't be using that number of users or overage. Other than more users than our plan costs, there are no other additional charges that I have found yet.

We looked at a couple other options, but we didn't feel confident that they would be able to support our usage needs and potential growth. When we were looking at the list of the different features, comparing them, one CYPHER Learning just blew TalentLMS out of the water. Therefore, we went for the potential to grow with CYPHER Learning over the lack of features that other companies had.

CYPHER LEARNING is very forward-looking in the fact that they don't want to be a typical LMS. They have taken into consideration AI, automation, rules, and gamification. These types of features are really transforming the way people learn. They are really using emerging technologies to be a learning management system that is intelligent and can adapt with the learner. This would be some of my best advice to consider as people are creating courses and training.

Keep an open mind in how students can best learn online. For example, I am learning about the different automation and gamification features and how they equate or relate to our company's goal. Besides learning how to become an expert in their platform and knowing how to use different features, I have observed how students can best learn on the platform.

The solution’s rules engine is on our radar. Now that our team is a bit bigger, we have some capacity to go into that. I am really looking forward to using its automation features and rules.

With facilitators, who know little to nothing about our content, we train them. So, it can be taught by anybody.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10 due to the reporting.

We use CYPHER Learning to train our employees and the public.

CYPHER Learning is hosted on our users' website. Our users can access it by logging in.

Several of our internal teams have joined the program, and they create training modules, which we then upload to CYPHER Learning and make available to everyone. CYPHER Learning has now put us in the position to provide better internal training than ever before, thanks to this tool that makes it easier. Since we have employees in multiple locations, we are now able to train our entire team more efficiently.

We have seen a small reduction in printing costs, but I foresee more savings as we ramp up our training.

I like that CYPHER Learning can accommodate all types of media, including video and audio. It is also easy to use. 

I really like that we can add third-party apps to make CYPHER Learning more useful. 

The assessment tools are one of the reasons we chose CYPHER Learning, so we could provide instructional feedback for incorrect assessment answers.

The customization is very good because it allows us to completely brand the product so that it is our brand.

I really appreciate the ability to provide feedback for assessments. However, the user interface for this feature is not very user-friendly. I think it could be improved by making it easier to understand.

CYPHER Learning has a lot of resources for finding answers. They have a search tool that allows us to search for answers on our own. However, I think it would be helpful if the resources were more structured in a how-to format. This would allow us to find the information we need without having to talk to a trainer or tech support. I think the current feature is good, but there could be more self-learning opportunities for how to use the product.

I have been using CYPHER Learning for almost eight months.

CYPHER Learning is stable. We have not had any issues.

CYPHER Learning is highly scalable. We are not using all the seats available yet.

The technical support is quick. I usually receive a response within just a few hours. If the support is not quite able to answer my question, they are very quick to respond to my follow-up questions. Once, a junior analyst answered my question, and then I think a senior analyst came in and added to the explanation to make it clearer. I'm not sure if it was to correct the junior analyst or to provide additional assistance, but it was impressive.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. However, it is a very full-featured system, so it has taken a lot of training to learn how to use it effectively. CYPHER Learning has provided excellent training materials, and our IT department has been very helpful in setting up the system and connecting it to our other systems. Overall, I think the setup process has been fairly straightforward.

We had several meetings with our IT and project management teams. It took some time to convince them of the benefits of using CYPHER Learning. I am on the education team, and our job is to train both internal and external users. We held several meetings and demos to explain what we wanted to use CYPHER Learning for and why we chose it. Once we had their buy-in, it was just a matter of getting the paperwork and approvals in order. Now we are in the process of creating half a dozen courses. We are still in the early stages of implementing CYPHER Learning, but we are excited about the possibilities.

Three people were involved in the deployment: two from the education team and one from IT.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We are still in the development phase. At this time, we are not seriously considering generating revenue through courses. Instead, we will be relying mostly on savings, travel expenses for training, and other expenses. As a result, I cannot say that we have seen a return on investment yet. CYPHER Learning is still in the investment phase.

We were happy with the pricing for CYPHER Learning. As a nonprofit, we received a discount. They were also able to work with us on some other questions we had. This was one of the reasons we chose CYPHER Learning. The price was fair for all the features we received.

We evaluated dozens of solutions and considered all of their features, prices, and reviews. In addition to CYPHER Learning, we narrowed down our choices to Moodle and Tovuti LMS. 

We selected CYPHER Learning primarily because of positive customer reviews and a competitive price. Customer reviews praised its ease of use, and the price was fair for the features we received. Additionally, CYPHER Learning appeared to have plenty of room for us to grow into. The features were robust enough that we would likely not use them all at first, but we would learn to use them as we needed them. CYPHER Learning seemed like it would challenge us, and it has. 

I give CYPHER Learning a nine out of ten. There are a few tweakable areas but I have no regrets about selecting CYPHER Learning.

We currently do not use the competency-based learning features of CYPHER Learning. However, one reason we chose CYPHER Learning is because it has the capacity to support our future growth in this area. Therefore, it is something we may use in the future, but not yet. 

We do have some audit automation as far as emails, reminders, and things like that, but not specifically gamification.

Since CYPHER Learning is a new system in our organization, we have not yet seen a reduction in our training costs. However, we anticipate a reduction in training costs as we begin to train employees remotely and no longer have to fly trainers to different locations.

We currently have 50 users, and we expect to have many more as we increase our training volume.

CYPHER Learning has not required any maintenance as of yet.

CYPHER Learning is a very powerful tool with many features. However, this also means that it has a steep learning curve. If we don't have a lot of time or are not comfortable with technology, CYPHER Learning may not be the best solution for us. However, if we are looking for a scalable and powerful tool that can grow with our needs, CYPHER Learning is a great option. Just be aware that it will take some time to learn how to use it effectively.

As a reseller, our use case is for a primary school in Egypt. They use it for uploading material for the students and organizing the content throughout the year. They also use it for adding their grades in the grade book and for communication. They have also tried using the gamification and the certificates and rewarding systems in CYPHER Learning, and it has been a pretty good experience for them so far.

The school we sold the system to is pretty happy with the organization of the content and the communication with the parents that the solution provides. They were also very happy with the gamification, the automation that happens within the system when a student finishes a specific part of the content or gets a specific score.

CYPHER Learning was also an additional value for that school, something they needed as they were advertising themselves as using the latest technology in education. The system helped with that, thanks to the stability and the strong features it furnishes.

And because it's pretty organized, it helps students keep track of their standing, both in terms of the materials being covered and within the assessments that they get.

It has also helped our client school reduce administrative work. From the feedback that I have gotten, it is saving them a lot of time.

CYPHER Learning has also reduced costs related to printing materials and textbook acquisitions a lot. This is one of the reasons people are going to software. It's not because they find it is much easier. Sometimes they go for the solution because it saves on costs. That's not just true of CYPHER Learning but of many other solutions.

What I like most is the usability of the system and the many options that it has. I can make a regular course or I can have the course organized remotely. I can turn off and on any feature that I like. That's what I find most interesting. Most LMSs have a fixed template for all the courses and the whole school uses it. When it comes to younger ages, they need fewer features so there won't be a lot of hassle for the teachers and parents. That's what we can do using CYPHER Learning: Just turn off anything that we don't need in a specific course.

I can also engage with the parents or students on different levels, either via groups, within the course or the forum.

The gamification is a good feature because not all LMSs have a gaming or reward system. The leaderboard makes for competition among the students, especially from ages 10 to 15, and makes them interested in moving forward in the educational process, throughout the game. It's good because students need to be engaged more in the educational process.

I find the gamification process easy, especially if I have something in mind for the game. Many teachers also found it pretty easy, while some didn't, but they weren't familiar with using technology in general. The ones who used it regularly with the students were very satisfied with it. In the end, students using it gain points and certificates or badges, and it depends on what the teacher has in mind for the students to compete on.

It's not hard for students to use gamification because, in the end, they just have to finish the material and upload it to get a specific score on a test. They get a badge, and they can see their progress on the leaderboard. It's very rewarding.

Gamification would be much better if there were integrations with LTI tools, or if there were some built-in questions for gamification. For example, if a student achieves a specific score on a test, it would be much better if they were interactive questions added to the assignment itself from within CYPHER Learning. It would be nice if they enhanced this part of the solution. There are many platforms for gamified tests and interactive assignments and worksheets but if these features were within the system, especially the gamification part, it would be great.

For international schools in Egypt, there are certification requirements. They have to have an LMS. But for other schools, it is a value proposition. We have 100 percent face-to-face learning in Egypt, now that COVID is over. There is competition when it comes to having schools use the system and sometimes we face difficulties getting schools, in general, to support this kind of educational process. Having something like gamification helps because students are more engaged with it and are more eager to use the system. That's especially true because they are fully attending classes in the school, nothing is online anymore, other than the materials and assignments in the system. It's good to have something to catch their attention.

Also, customization of report cards is hard to handle, with the grading criteria that specific schools use. It can be done for each course, but in the end, students receive report cards or certificates for their progress throughout the term and the year and it's hard to customize these report cards. They don't have a grading scheme for the Egyptian curriculum.

In addition, if the system had some graphing abilities and not just exporting of data to Excel sheets, that would be nice. I would like to be able to run a report on something and get graphs with insightful data. In an Excel sheet, I just have to reanalyze the data.

For example, if I want to run a report on students' attendance, it doesn't have to be a number for the whole school or a sheet of numbers. It could give me some graphs on different stages or different courses. If I am analyzing a student's time spent within a course, I would like to see how many hours he spent compared to other students. It would help if there were an analytical part to the data obtained from the system.

Also, I have to do a lot of clicking to reach something. When I go back, it just closes all that I did. It collapses everything. It doesn't make it hard to use, but it's disturbing to have to do all those clicks.

We studied the product before we finally started introducing it into the Egyptian market in 2021. There is a school contracted with us for it right now so I have almost one year of user experience. We provide training on the system and technical support for the school.

We are a reseller of educational solutions, both hardware and software. They can be learning management systems, school management systems, and interactive, live panels. Sometimes we sell full solutions to a school, and we provide training and follow-up throughout the year. The Egyptian market is a bit hard to compete in, but not many companies resell these products here.

Solutions like these have gone viral with COVID-19 and schools need support and onsite training for the teachers, and this is what we've been providing for the past 12 years.

It's a pretty good product. In our company, we only resell three products, and CYPHER Learning is one of them. It's pretty reliable and it has a lot of features.

It could be used on many sites, and it will be even better once we have more schools interested in deploying LMSs in their schools. From what I have seen of the system, it could even be used in colleges and universities.

We are involved in implementing CYPHER Learning. First, we open the account and then pay for the license. Then, we start putting the data of the school on the system. We give them the courses, the users, the links for parents and students, and we start helping them with uploading the material. Sometimes, we help them with the grading process, if needed.

I find the initial setup is pretty easy, but schools here have many things inside things, inside things. It becomes a complicated hierarchy. That's what makes it hard. It's easy to get it done on the system, once we figure out what we want things to look like in the end.

We did the setup ourselves. During the first term, we started getting support from CYPHER LEARNING, and it was pretty good. We learned a few points and they gave us good support.

We have evaluated many LMSs before. Some are produced locally in Egypt, some are from the greater Middle East, and some are solutions like Blackboard, Classe365, and others. I'm familiar with using different LMSs and have done comparisons between them.

We provide many products to the Egyptian market. Our customers are the ones who choose. We find that CYPHER Learning is a pretty interesting system, full of features, and it's pretty stable. I can see that the product is developing very well and covers a lot of the needs of the Egyptian market. It's also pretty easy to use, especially if you are provided the right training from the company. We feel that there are many selling points to the product.

My advice would be to organize all the work and the output so that you can see how it would be deployed in the system, and not just look for a single output. Using technology, you can have a million outputs with the same value. You can be flexible with the system, and it will give you the results that you need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

We didn't previously use another solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution as seven out of 10.

It is the virtual platform of the school and my virtual classroom. I post the tasks and the lessons for the class through Zoom.

CYPHER Learning has helped us a lot with the situation where, because of health issues, students cannot attend school. Because we have this platform, students have the day-to-day lesson program available to them everywhere. If they are sick they can connect to the class from home via Zoom. They can access everything the teacher works on via the platform. It is no longer like it used to be that when a student missed school they had to copy all the content they had missed in class.

In terms of administrative work, it has reduced the time spent on that by quite a lot. For example, it used to take us time to call names and see who was present at the beginning of a class. Now, we can do it more directly through CYPHER Learning. It has a more agile way of checking attendance. As a platform in general, it has helped us to simplify our procedures.

It has definitely also helped in reducing the costs of physical materials because we don't print as many copies anymore. We exploit the platform quite a lot in this sense. If a textbook costs 150 soles, multiplied by four books for different subjects, that cost parents 600 soles. You can imagine the amount that parents save when CYPHER Learning is used instead of books.

Some of the most valuable features are the

• real-time online assignments that don't limit you to working from one place only
• comment forums
• assignments.

Teachers upload jobs to the platform and students upload all their answers to the platform and CYPHER Learning makes it easy for us to view them immediately.

We also use the platform for automation and adaptive learning purposes. The ability to set trigger rules that show or hide specific class sections or assignments is as optimal as possible. Because it is intuitive, it is easy to create content for students in a personalized way. And it is very intuitive for the students. They only need to enter the platform and they see their particular courses on the home screen.

And the competency-based learning is very visual and easy to use. The labeling is quite simple. It is very important because, beyond the content, we focus on the teaching of skills and these are embedded in the competencies. It is important that we have this tool to do evaluations as it helps us better know what the real status of a student is. The ability to track student progress on a competency basis through a mastery grid is very important for the school because we can see what the student's progress is, the time it takes, and the time he spends on the platform.

Also, with the direct message tray, students can notify you of things, and it's very simple. That feature is excellent because it helps a lot with communication among teachers, parents, and students. As a teacher, I can also leave a comment on an assignment to give feedback.

The types of activities the system has, help engage students and develop their independence and higher-order thinking skills. For example, the forums are used a lot because they help students with the ability to form arguments and express their own opinions. Thanks to CYPHER Learning, we can provide diverse activities. It has made the students perform better because they are no longer always doing the same routine tasks.

And the solution’s gamified learning environment is quite interesting because it is a much more personalized way to communicate with the student. There are teachers who have obtained more knowledge through the use of CYPHER Learning than the rest of us and they can help us with this. Many times, these teachers find different aspects and activities and, as they use them, they share the process with their colleagues.

Because it's the space where we upload materials, colleagues can share their knowledge with you. For example, I really like the library that the system has. It allows me to pull activities that are archived or a card that I can adapt as I want and then send it to a student who is having problems and needs guidance. This can help that student get to the same level as the rest of the class.

The system should help us more in the area of evaluation. I don't think CYPHER Learning has exploited this topic enough. I can upload rubrics for evaluation, but there are no additional information sources or other instruments for student evaluation.

We have been using CYPHER LEARNING since the pandemic began, so approximately three and a half years.

In all the time we have used the platform, we have only had one network outage message. They told us that the system was going to be updated and that we wouldn't be able to use it during that period of time. It was only half a day and after that, we had no more problems.

It is a platform that is constantly updated and constantly growing.

We have almost 140 teachers, and we also have users who are students, directors, families, and our technical team.

We are counting on continuing to use the platform, and part of our plans for the future is to increase the usage of it.

The one time I had a problem with syncing CYPHER Learning with a Zoom meeting, I contacted their support team and they dealt with it as if it were an urgent matter. They responded and solved my issue quite quickly.

Positive

I used Google Classroom but it's not close to CYPHER Learning. The latter definitely offers many more possibilities. Google Classroom has improved a lot but, by then, we had acquired CYPHER Learning, so we haven't used Google Classroom anymore.

Our systems team gave us training and tutorials. It was a period of about four weeks from the time CYPHER Learning arrived at the school until we started using it.

The peace of mind and satisfaction that I have from having a space where students and their families can find everything are invaluable.

We have young students who sometimes don't entirely copy what they see in class. Now, parents can enter the system to find out what topics their children have seen and be more aware of what is happening with their children.

I would recommend CYPHER Learning. It's so intuitive that anyone can handle it. You don't need much training. In our school, we use it from the initial grades with young children. For parents and students, the platform is very intuitive.

I give it a nine out of 10. There are some additional features that I would like it to have, but it is a platform that meets the standards. We are very satisfied with our work in CYPHER Learning. It has streamlined our work with students.

Foreign Language:(Spanish)

¿Cuál es nuestro caso de uso principal?

Es la plataforma virtual del colegio y mi aula virtual. Publico las tareas y las lecciones para la clase a través de Zoom.

¿Cómo ha ayudado a mi organización?

CYPHER Learning nos ha ayudado mucho con la situación en la que, por problemas de salud, los estudiantes no pueden asistir a la escuela. Debido a que tenemos esta plataforma, los estudiantes tienen el programa de lecciones del día a día disponible en todas partes. Si están enfermos, pueden conectarse a la clase desde casa a través de Zoom. Pueden acceder a todo lo que el profesor trabaja a través de la plataforma. Ya no es como antes, cuando un estudiante faltaba a la escuela tenía que copiar todo el contenido que había perdido en clase.

En términos de trabajo administrativo, ha reducido bastante el tiempo dedicado a eso. Por ejemplo, solía llevarnos tiempo decir nombres y ver quién estaba presente al comienzo de una clase. Ahora, podemos hacerlo de forma más directa a través de CYPHER Learning. Tiene una forma más ágil de controlar la asistencia. Como plataforma en general, nos ha ayudado a simplificar nuestros trámites.

Definitivamente también ha ayudado a reducir los costos de los materiales físicos porque ya no imprimimos tantas copias. Explotamos bastante la plataforma en este sentido. Si un libro de texto cuesta 150 soles, multiplicado por cuatro libros de diferentes materias, eso le cuesta a los padres 600 soles. Puede imaginar la cantidad que los padres ahorran cuando se usa CYPHER Learning en lugar de libros.

¿Qué es lo más valioso?

Algunas de las características más valiosas son

• tareas en línea en tiempo real que no lo limitan a trabajar desde un solo lugar
• foros de comentarios
• Los maestros suben trabajos a la plataforma y los estudiantes suben todas sus respuestas a la plataforma y CYPHER Learning nos facilita verlos de inmediato.

También utilizamos la plataforma con fines de automatización y aprendizaje adaptativo. La capacidad de establecer reglas de activación que muestran u ocultan secciones o tareas de clase específicas es lo más óptima posible. Debido a que es intuitivo, es fácil crear contenido para los estudiantes de forma personalizada. Y es muy intuitivo para los estudiantes. Con solo ingresar a la plataforma ya ven sus cursos particulares en la pantalla de inicio.

El aprendizaje basado en competencias es muy visual y fácil de usar. El etiquetado es bastante simple. Es muy importante porque, más allá de los contenidos, nos enfocamos en la enseñanza de habilidades y estas están integradas en las competencias. Es importante que tengamos esta herramienta para hacer evaluaciones ya que nos ayuda a conocer mejor cuál es el estado real de un alumno. La capacidad de realizar un seguimiento del progreso de los estudiantes en función de las competencias a través de una cuadrícula de dominio es muy importante para la escuela porque podemos ver cuál es el progreso del estudiante, el tiempo que tarda y el tiempo que pasa en la plataforma.

Además, con la bandeja de mensajes directos, los alumnos pueden avisarte de cosas, y es muy sencillo. Esa característica es excelente porque ayuda mucho con la comunicación entre maestros, padres y estudiantes. Como profesor, también puedo dejar un comentario en una tarea para dar retroalimentación.

Los tipos de actividades que tiene el sistema ayudan a involucrar a los estudiantes y a desarrollar su independencia y habilidades de pensamiento de orden superior. Por ejemplo, los foros se usan mucho porque ayudan a los estudiantes con la capacidad de formar argumentos y expresar sus propias opiniones. Gracias a CYPHER Learning, podemos ofrecer diversas actividades. Ha hecho que los estudiantes se desempeñen mejor porque ya no están siempre haciendo las mismas tareas rutinarias.

Y el entorno de aprendizaje gamificado de la solución es bastante interesante porque es una forma mucho más personalizada de comunicarse con el alumno. Hay profesores que han obtenido más conocimientos mediante el uso de CYPHER Learning que el resto de nosotros y nos pueden ayudar con esto. Muchas veces, estos docentes encuentran diferentes aspectos y actividades y, a medida que las utilizan, comparten el proceso con sus compañeros.

Debido a que es el espacio donde subimos materiales, los compañeros pueden compartir sus conocimientos contigo. Por ejemplo, me gusta mucho la biblioteca que tiene el sistema. Me permite sacar actividades que están archivadas o una ficha que puedo adaptar a mi gusto y luego enviársela a un alumno que está teniendo problemas y necesita orientación. Esto puede ayudar a que el estudiante alcance el mismo nivel que el resto de la clase.

¿Qué necesita mejorar?

El sistema debería ayudarnos más en el área de evaluación. No creo que CYPHER Learning haya explotado lo suficiente este tema. Puedo subir rúbricas para la evaluación, pero no hay fuentes de información adicionales u otros instrumentos para la evaluación de los estudiantes.

¿Por cuánto tiempo he usado la solución?

Hemos estado usando CYPHER LEARNING desde que comenzó la pandemia, aproximadamente hace tres años y medio.

¿Qué pienso sobre la estabilidad de la solución?

En todo el tiempo que hemos usado la plataforma, solo hemos tenido un mensaje de corte de red. Nos dijeron que iban a actualizar el sistema y que no lo podríamos usar durante ese tiempo. Fue solo medio día y después de eso, no tuvimos más problemas.

¿Qué opino de la escalabilidad de la solución?

Es una plataforma en constante actualización y en constante crecimiento.

Tenemos casi 140 docentes, y también tenemos usuarios que son estudiantes, directores, familias y nuestro equipo técnico.

Contamos con seguir usando la plataforma, y parte de nuestros planes para el futuro es aumentar el uso de la misma.

¿Cómo son el servicio de atención al cliente y el soporte?

La única vez que tuve un problema fue con la sincronización de CYPHER Learning con una reunión de Zoom, contacté a su equipo de soporte y lo trataron como si fuera un asunto urgente. Respondieron y resolvieron mi problema bastante rápido.

¿Cómo calificaría el servicio y soporte al cliente?

Positivo

¿Qué solución usé anteriormente y por qué cambié?

Usé Google Classroom pero no está cerca de CYPHER Learning ya que este definitivamente ofrece muchas más posibilidades. Google Classroom ha mejorado mucho pero, para entonces, habíamos adquirido CYPHER Learning, por lo que ya no usamos Google Classroom.

¿Cómo fue la configuración inicial?

Nuestro equipo de sistemas nos brindó capacitación y tutoriales. Fue un período de aproximadamente cuatro semanas desde que CYPHER Learning llegó a la escuela hasta que comenzamos a usarlo.

¿Cuál fue nuestro Retorno de Inversión?

La tranquilidad y satisfacción que tengo de tener un espacio donde los estudiantes y sus familias pueden encontrar de todo son invaluables.

Tenemos jóvenes estudiantes que a veces no copian del todo lo que ven en clase. Ahora, los padres pueden ingresar al sistema para saber qué temas han visto sus hijos y estar más al tanto de lo que sucede con sus hijos.

¿Qué otro consejo tengo?

Recomendaría CYPHER Learning. Es tan intuitivo que cualquiera puede manejarlo. No necesitas mucho entrenamiento. En nuestra escuela lo usamos desde los grados iniciales con niños pequeños. Para padres y alumnos, la plataforma es muy intuitiva.

Le doy un nueve sobre 10. Hay algunas características adicionales que me gustaría que tuviera, pero es una plataforma que cumple con los estándares. Estamos muy satisfechos con nuestro trabajo en CYPHER Learning. Ha agilizado nuestro trabajo con los estudiantes.