Pt 2: No more one-size fits all training

The challenge

• Limited course delivery options, primarily relying on instructor-based training with fixed schedules
• Disruption in the medical coding industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating a shift to online training
• Maintaining engagement and supplementing the loss of interaction in the transition from facility-based to online learning

How did things change after 2021?

Colin Christie, Co-Founder & Managing Director: It's been an interesting journey since the pandemic started. If we look at where we were more recently, we were  limited in scope. We were doing live, in-person training, with small groups. At first, we were just replicating that same sort of model online, but once we realized the potential, we really scaled up.

Now we are able to work with BPO partner companies, and train very large groups of people simultaneously. The concern was if the quality would suffer if we tried to deal with a large group of people. However, the insights that we get from the platform, and the ability to measure the progress of the learners very closely means that we can still maintain that quality, we can intervene very quickly where people need more help. Therefore, we've been able to expand training in two ways: not just in terms of the number of people, but also geographically throughout The Philippines, the Middle East, and literally around the world, so we've come quite a way from where we were a year ago.

Carlos Ongaco, Co-Founder & Chief Training Officer: For the longest time, we were just dealing with classes of 12-15 learners, that we called "big classes", then we were able to sign up a corporate client, which gave us 100 learners who are supposed to study all of the same time. We knew that CYPHER would be able to do it, but we still had to test it.

We were pleasantly surprised that everything held up. All 100 learners went to the course without any hitch, 100 students, four different classes, and different time zones.

The solution

Implementation

Features

Carlos Ongaco, Co-Founder & Chief Training Officer: Online learning has forced us to explore all of these functions even more because we do not have our face-to-face kind of thing. We used competency-based learning as we were able to align our program in such a way that it measures exactly what the learners would be up to in the certification exam waiting for them 90 days down the line.

That setting up of the competencies, eventually feeds into what's called a mastery report, which is a godsend for us because it has taken out all of the guesswork in determining whether a particular learner is ready. When you do the mastery report,  everything is presented in numbers, and we structured it in such a way that everything is measured down to the level of the question, throughout the entire course.

The second feature is the dashboard. This is my favorite because it gives you a bird's-eye view of how each learner is doing in the entire course. It tracks their progress and mastery, and it even tracks the amount of time they spend on the course itself. This leads to the third feature that we so love, activity time, which measures how much time each person is spending on one of the activities that we've lined up for them. Those are the three things that impacted us in making sure that training that has been done in the course turned out to be successful.

Theo Aman, Live Virtual Class Learner: One of the features that I love about the learning management system is its flexibility. One time, our trainers scheduled an exam on the day that I wasn't home. Because of how CYPHER was set up, I didn't need my laptop; I just needed a tablet, and when I got to my destination, I was able to take the exam and didn't have to miss it, so that's one of the features of CYPHER that I really love.

Franz Tan, Medical Coding Instructor: My personal favorite is the analytics section of the assessments and quizzes because it gives us the overall data on the performance of the classes. Thus, we can easily address their weak points and provide reviews.

The results

• Transitioning to the CYPHER platform for online course delivery, recommended by partners for its features and ease of use
• Rapid implementation of online training within 24 hours, leveraging CYPHER's user-friendly interface and pre-existing setup
• Utilizing CYPHER's gamification feature to enhance learner engagement and provide virtual recognition, compensating for the loss of in-person interaction

Carlos Ongaco, Co-Founder & Chief Training Officer: A lot of the work we did as trainers, myself included, was "manual." In that, we were doing everything and exporting in Excel and whatnot. It's very tedious and hard to capture information, but once you onboard an LMS like CYPHER, all of that tediousness and extra work is taken out. It becomes easier for us to get an idea of how each individual learner is doing without us spending so much time trying to build up that data. At this point, I'd like to share that throughout the time we were shifting fully into online training, we also prepared for doing adult learning, so it became online training "x" adult learning.

It was a total paradigm shift for all of us because not only did we have CYPHER taking all of the administrative stuff out, we totally changed perspective and adopted the adult learning method for our learners. In this whole new world of remote work and remote learning, CYPHER's LMS has allowed us to pivot into this whole new way of doing things and then flourish after that. What started out as a business continuity for us turned out to be our growth driver after all.