Platform exceeded known and unknown challenges

The challenge

• Difficulty in providing training in five different continents
• Providing access all of the training material

"We’re a global coach training organization. We provide coach training on five different continents and five languages all around the world. Our students come from all around the world, requiring that we have a common area for us to access to all of our material. CYPHER has allowed us to provide access to all of our students and faculty globally and to create synchronous as well as asynchronous classes."

The solution

• Stronger relationships between faculty and students through effective communication
• Ability to archive and manage resources
• Students can access the platform anytime, anywhere

One of our faculty members had been working with another organization who tried CYPHER. We went on their website, I had a conversation with them and found out that they were a great fit for what we needed.

Adoption process

So, once we signed on with CYPHER the transition process went very smoothly. The platform is very user friendly and easy to adopt. They have a support team that we can talk to and they can answer our questions and fill in some of the gaps.

Improvements

One of the things we’ve noticed is that over the years CYPHER has continued to improve their product. In our case, the communication between students and faculty, the speed that they’re able to communicate has increased dramatically. That’s really made a difference in the relationship between students and faculty in our program. We can use the email system in the platform to connect with each other without having an outside contact database. Students can submit papers or projects that they’ve completed any time of day. Faculty can respond to students and grade those papers. All-in-all it’s really made the relationship between student and faculty quite a bit better.

Features

There are two features that we really, really like about this system. The first is, and it doesn’t sound glamorous, but we’re able to archive everything that we do. We record all of our classes, we fill the classrooms with all kinds of resources, and then it’s archived so that students can go back and review the material years later, even if they have graduated. It also allowed students to stay connected with our staff and reconnect years later. Often these students will then enroll in another program that we offer, which really adds to our program. The other feature we really like is being able to access the platform anytime, anywhere. Whether you have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, you can jump into any of our classes. We’ve had students join a class from the airport, while they were waiting for their flight.

One of the things that our instructors like about this system is that they can put resources, documents, and drafts for students to read ahead of time in the resource area of each classroom. This way students are prepared. Faculty can also place things in that same resource area after class for continued learning.