CYPHER Learning Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We utilize it for the Music ConstructED Business, a department within West Music, which collaborates with elementary music teachers and their professional development in that career field. We offer various courses and resources for purchase. The primary focus is professional development for elementary music teachers.

One of the significant advantages is that they offer a help center and ticket support. Especially in the beginning, I was submitting tickets every week to ask how to accomplish various tasks. It was incredibly helpful to have someone there to guide us. We received around ten hours of onboarding training, which helped us understand the best practices for using the platform. If we hadn’t received that training, we would have had to backtrack to fix things according to those best practices.

CYPHER Learning helps align skills with course materials, but a significant part of this process depends on how we design the courses. We have not utilized their AI feature for course creation because our topics are very specific. Instead, we gather information directly from various presenters who develop the courses for us. Our process is largely manual since the presenters provide the content, and we simply input it into the system. Given the specificity of the topic, it requires a human touch, especially since we are in the classroom with the students. Therefore, we choose not to use the AI feature.

We build our courses ourselves and can customize them. We enjoy how easy it is to create a course based on our needs. They have a wide variety of customization options, which we can use to make it work for our customers and our presenters.

CYPHER Learning has significantly reduced our course creation time. Previously, we used a WordPress plugin that required us to manually input every single course. We created courses for specific seasons and couldn’t copy existing ones, meaning we had to recreate them each time. On top of that, we were responsible for manually issuing certificates and sending out grades, which made the entire process very labor-intensive. Every aspect required manual effort—we had to create, edit, and upload courses ourselves, and if any errors occurred, we had to fix them manually. With CYPHER Learning, that workload has been reduced by more than half. I hardly need to log into the platform to maintain it since most updates happen automatically. Now, our questions have shifted from troubleshooting access issues to inquiries about course details from potential buyers. This change has represented a significant improvement over our previous system.

Gamification and certification are the most frequently used automation in our courses. Some courses contain messages, but overall, our offerings are quite diverse. I manually build a portion of the courses using a template, which significantly reduces the time required for setup since I don’t have to input all the settings individually or in a specific order. We have a Sync feature available, but not all courses can utilize it due to their unique nature. However, for our higher education courses that are repeated each semester, I can simply duplicate the template to create new courses or sync the course from that template if there are any necessary edits. This process makes it much easier than manually editing each course individually. Currently, we have about 70 courses on the platform. Occasionally, I encounter a setting that I believe complicates the student experience. Instead of revisiting every single course, I can edit the template directly, which then applies the changes across all relevant courses. Having this ability to make adjustments at the template level has been extremely helpful.

CYPHER Learning has significantly improved our onboarding processes and users' learning curves. With our previous platform, accessing and purchasing courses was quite difficult. Now, the process is much more automated. We offer a wide variety of courses, and users can easily search through them. It's also easier for us to generate profit since users can quickly enter the platform, purchase courses, and choose from many different options. Navigating to the professional development site has become much more straightforward as well. Instead of having to follow a complicated path on our website and click specific buttons, the site now appears seamlessly. Overall, the improvements have made it much easier for our users to utilize our platform, which is fantastic.

For learners, training time has significantly decreased. They are now automatically enrolled in an onboarding course. We have utilized the platform more effectively by creating a course that helps them understand where to make purchases and reminds them that they can place purchase orders through us, as we work with schools and school districts. This course provides all the necessary answers and directs learners to the appropriate contact person. We have only received a handful of troubleshooting inquiries regarding the courses, which were typically due to incorrect settings but were easy to resolve. Previously, we would get weekly emails from users reporting issues or asking how to do something. With CYPHER Learning, the process has become much easier; we no longer deal with those types of inquiries, allowing users to reach their destinations more quickly. 

On the building side, I have been responsible for developing everything on the Learning Management System (LMS), which required me to learn many new skills. Overall, the process was quite enjoyable. We currently don’t have anyone else who has built courses on the site. I found the learning curve to be manageable, especially thanks to the training I received from the spokesperson for CYPHER. This training enabled me to navigate the system effectively. There have been a few occasions when I had to demonstrate my work to others, as we were considering having them build a course. CYPHER's flexibility is both a benefit and a challenge. While its customizability is advantageous, our additional modifications on top of their existing features have made the system somewhat complex. I have taken the time to document my processes and showcase my work. The templates provided make the tasks much easier, but there is still a lot to understand.

We collaborate with school districts to enhance skill learning. Often, we receive substantial orders from these districts that spend thousands of dollars on professional development courses. In response, we create dedicated portals within our platform specifically for training their teachers, which has proven to be very effective. Initially, we partnered with three school districts, but that number has now grown to seven. We're also seeing more school districts approaching us for professional training for their educators, indicating a positive impact. I take pride in the professional development courses we offer.

CYPHER has significantly saved us time by streamlining the troubleshooting process. Previously, we relied on a third party to help us resolve issues, which required us to transfer information back and forth. This often led to chaos, as we had to communicate the same issues multiple times. Now, with CYPHER, all the troubleshooting is handled in-house, and all necessary customizations and automation are in place. It has made everything much easier. We no longer spend valuable time each week on certifications, automation, messaging, and troubleshooting—it's truly been a game-changer for us.

We have implemented as much automation as possible. I have set up the templates, so I only need to input the content. As we progress, we have made adjustments, and our presenters are now providing content in more effective ways, which simplifies the input process since we understand the system's capabilities. On our end, we have also improved efficiency by refining what we collect from the presenters to create the courses and by outlining the course structure from the beginning.

We are utilizing CYPHER Learning to grant our users access to courses, along with all the tools and features available in Sharjah. Consequently, we are offering a comprehensive professional development process, which we publish on this particular learning platform. This allows users to conveniently obtain their certificates through the extended workflow. If any learning surpasses our expectations, it is treated separately and we incur a fee for the service.

The features of CYPHER Learning have been beneficial to our processes and efficiency. Our previous platform took time for us to see any benefits. With CYPHER Learning, we can easily integrate with our ticket system and track issues related to learning courses. We already have a solution that requires less of our time.

Gamification helps with certification because it assigns points, making it easy for us to assign, share, and upload badges. 

We have observed a substantial increase in enrollment on our platform, primarily attributed to the gamification feature. We can track the number of services users have enrolled in, and there has been a significant surge over the past three months.

CYPHER Learning has the ability to recommend courses or assignments to learners based on their job title or a set of competencies. One of our institutions in India utilizes CYPHER Learning, and we can readily implement other NTP governance and engineering in relation to this. This provides us with a competitive advantage in the market due to the multitude of courses we have developed and published, as well as the numerous certificates we have issued.

CYPHER Learning empowers us with a plethora of features in the program. Learners have been sharing their certificates associated with our platforms and mentioning our schools. The count of followers and enrollees has escalated. We have two stages: the first is the professional development program, and the second is the post-credit diploma. We use Citrix LMS for our professional development program, and Canvas LMS for our postgraduate diploma. Our business has increased significantly in the one year that we have been using CYPHER Learning.

We offer hybrid courses for individuals who are preparing for licensing examinations and postgraduate diplomas. The licensing examination is one of the most significant courses available on our platform and is a hybrid course.

It is important for our organization to be able to offer combined training for both business and education purposes.

The training is currently offered free of charge to everyone.

Since implementing CYPHER Learning, we have observed a decrease in our administrative workload compared to our previous platform. We now only need two dedicated individuals to handle all the tickets, whereas before, everyone was involved.

We use it for asynchronous learning across our institution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We operate an online education platform that sells courses to audiences all over the world. We have a global audience, and we use CYPHER Learning as our primary learning management system. CYPHER Learning is our only LMS.

CYPHER Learning is a web-based application, so there is no need to deploy it. However, there is also an app that can be used to access the portal.

CYPHER Learning has allowed us to spend less time administering content. We no longer have to worry about whether our website is functioning or whether the content is being delivered as intended. That's what CYPHER Learning is for. They streamline the delivery of content, so we know how to set up classes, courses, assessments, and diplomas. CYPHER Learning also takes on a lot of the administrative burden from our organization, including customer support.

We use the gamification feature in relation to certification, but we are not yet taking full advantage of it. We are definitely looking into it.

CYPHER Learning has helped us reduce our training costs by approximately $2,000 per person trained.

CYPHER Learning has helped to reduce costs related to printing our materials.

We wouldn't be able to do what we do without CYPHER Learning. It's hard to quantify how much CYPHER Learning has helped increase profits, but it's essential to our business. Without CYPHER Learning, we wouldn't have a school.