FAQs

CYPHER Learning exists to give learners the power to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Trainers, learning and development (L&D) pros, HR pros, and educators get everything they need in one platform to deliver faster, more personalized, and better learning outcomes. We provide the only all-in-one AI-powered learning platform that is easy-to-use, beautifully designed, and built to power billions of learning moments everyday. Create courses faster. Train and teach better. Learn even quicker. Experience our "just in time, just for you, just the way you want to learn" approach that puts people first.

In a world where high demand courses are limited by time and budget, traditional learning systems bring complexity and costs making creating engaging courses difficult.

CYPHER Learning provides the only AI-powered learning platform that enables you to create courses faster, teach and train better, and learn even quicker. 

With traditional methods, it takes three to six months to create courses. With CYPHER, 83% of customers were able to deliver courses in less than 15 days. With those efficiencies, 82% of customers now update courses at least once per year. Plus, 77% of CYPHER customers say course development costs less than $1,000 per course, opposed to $5,000 to $20,000 with traditional methods.

CYPHER Learning is like no other AI-powered learning platform. Key areas that set-us apart:

World's first AI-powered learning platform 

In a world where time is money and agility is key, CYPHER is leading the way. Designed for anyone that wants to create, teach, train, and learn – quicker – our world’s first AI-powered learning platform makes it a reality.

• Create courses quicker: Modules, assessments, competency-mapping, gamification and more in minutes
• Teach and train quicker: Platform-wide automation, easy analysis and reporting
• Learn quicker: Just in time, just for me, just the way I want it learning for quick upskilling and mastery

Top-rated personalized skills development

Recognized by U.S. News & World Report as the best LMS for Skills development - achieve personalized skills growth through up-skilling, re-skilling, and cross-skilling, driven by a competency-based strategy. CYPHER seamlessly integrates advanced features, including automation, mastery tracking, digital profiles, learning groups, learning paths, Q&A forums, and 16+ assessments. Our comprehensive toolkit encompasses standard ontologies, job titles, and competencies, materializing tailored skill enhancement. Notably, CYPHER Agent helps to ensure scalable personalized learning across your entire organization, fostering expertise and growth. This synergy between personalized learning paths, learning groups, and AI-powered tools reshapes skills development, turning aspirations into achievements.

Create more time to teach and train

The only platform built from the ground-up around automation. CYPHER Agent takes care of the mundane and tedious tasks supporting skills development, gamification, compliance, course creation, onboarding, skill mastery, and more. Even without AI technology, we offer 25+ automated actions that give trainers, L&D pros, HR pros, and admins the gift of time. Time to focus on training. Time to be creative. Time to problem solve. Time to connect with learners. If you want to maximize your time, our AI-powered tools can help you create a comprehensive course with skills development, gamification, assessments, and more - in minutes.

CYPHER Agent is the world's first course creation companion AND instant learning companion!

Drive engagement

Go beyond badges. Awards, competition, and motivation keeps learners engaged with CYPHER leveled-up gamification. Use leaderboards, periodic leveling, and games in courses and learning paths for individual, group and site-wide points based on participation, scores, and more. CYPHER has the world’s largest implementation of gamification with over 120,000 users. Embed gamification automatically with the help of CYPHER Agent.

Keep the human connection

The only platform to provide a Universal Translator for real-time communications such as messages and posting. Connect with others who share the same learning goals. Feel close to your learning community even when physically apart with wikis, forums, chat, the Green Dot activity indicator, and scrolling real-time widgets.

Valuable training ROI

eLearning Industry recognized CYPHER Learning as a Top Platform to Measure Training ROI. CYPHER empowers HR and L&D pros to measure competency and mastery ROI for further insights. Customers gain a comprehensive set of analytics and reporting tools to get valuable data on training initiatives.

When you choose CYPHER Learning, you gain an unwavering ally. Our dedicated team is committed to your success, providing exceptional support, comprehensive training, and unmatched customer satisfaction.

CYPHER Learning was founded in 2009 by Graham Glass.

Glass, the CEO and founder of CYPHER Learning, is a pioneer in the development of modern digital learning platforms. Glass brings more than 30 years of thought leadership to the education and technology fields—an essential background for judicious application of AI in 2024. Born and educated in Britain, Graham emigrated to the US in 1983. He studied, then taught, computer science and training dynamics at the University of Texas in Dallas. Lobbied by nearby technology firms to package his training curriculum for their employees, Glass founded a series of companies focused on L&D: ObjectLesson, ObjectSpace, The Mind Electric, EDU 2.0, and CYPHER Learning—which is leading the revolution in AI-powered learning platforms as it serves businesses and educational institutions around the world. Graham has written numerous books on computer programming. Today he divides his time between Texas, California, and the UK.

CYPHER Learning is headquartered in Plano, Texas. The company has a global presence in locations such as the USA, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Jordan, South Africa, Dubai, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia.

CYPHER for business is for learning and development (L&D) pros, HR pros, trainers, admins, and managers in businesses that need customer/employee/partner training, up-skilling, career development, onboarding, certification, compliance, DEI training, and more.

CYPHER for academia is for educators like teachers, instructors, and admins in schools, universities, colleges, and trade schools that need hybrid learning, personalized learning, continuous learning, teacher/student onboarding, continuous learning, professional development, and more.

Read reviews from our clients worldwide.

The feature naming caters to each market. For example, CYPHER for business allows users to be associated with specific organizations and provides manager accounts to allow managers to monitor the progress of learners in their organization.

CYPHER for academia provides parent accounts to allow parents to monitor the progress of their children.

Both provide unlimited storage, but CYPHER for business supports larger individual file size limits.

See the features for business and academia.

To ensure the privacy and security of each client, please reach out to your manager, teacher, HR team, or L&D department to find out the URL that is used by your organization.

CYPHER is the only all-in-one AI-powered learning platform that is easy-to-use, beautifully designed, and built to power billions of learning moments everyday.

Google Classroom is also a learning platform, but it lacks many features that are essential for business and academic institutions. CYPHER is a more modern, powerful, and intuitive LMS.

With CYPHER, trainers, learning and development (L&D) pros, HR pros, and educators get everything they need in one platform to deliver faster, more personalized, and better learning outcomes. 

World's first generative AI learning platform 

In a world where time is money and agility is key, CYPHER is leading the necessary disruption of learning platforms. Designed for anyone that wants to create, teach, train, and learn – quicker – our world’s first generative AI learning platform makes it a reality.

• Create courses quicker: Modules, assessments, competency-mapping, gamification and more in minutes
• Teach and train quicker: Platform-wide automation, easy analysis and reporting
• Learn quicker: Just in time, just for me, just the way I want it learning for quick upskilling and mastery

CYPHER is the only platform built from the ground-up with sophisticated automation, world-class gamification, enterprise-strength integrations, and thoughtful human-centered connections (forums, 50+ languages, Universal Translator, wikis, chat, etc.) - enabling CYPHER to leap frog any competitor. Our leading AI innovations like CYPHER Agent have been featured in CNN and CBS.

World's first course creation companion AND instant learning companion!

Easy adoption and unlimited scalability 

Our platform is designed for seamless implementation and easy adoption by all.  Brandon Hall Group says: "The technology behaves the way humans think and act."

Sophisticated automation

Our platform supports a range of functions, platform-wide, including reporting/analytics, world-class gamification beyond badges (periodic leveling, leaderboards, points, awards, etc.), and AI-powered companions to accelerate and scale engaging modern learning. Designed to increase teacher and trainer productivity. Brandon Hall Group says… “this tech truly does save time and energy and is infinitely scalable."

Skills / competency-based learning approach

With our unique approach to learning, learners advance by demonstrating mastery of a topic/class through reliable and accurate assessment (over 16 types of assessments). Easily track performance and progress in a single, comprehensive view. Smart and proactive recommendations.

Industry recognition and awards 

Forbes Advisor Top LMS, Forbes Top Enterprise LMS, Forbes Top Employee Training Software, U.S. News and World Report's Top LMS for Skills Development, Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Award (honorable mention in Education), Top rated for usability and easiest to work with several times in a row from G2, eLearning Industry Top LMS for product training, onboarding, gamification, training ROI, #1 PeerSpot Top LMS Leader, CODiE Award Winner, Representative Vendor in the Gartner®️ Higher Education Market Guide.

From technical troubleshooting to training resources, we offer tiered support plans to provide the tools and guidance you need to keep your LMS running smoothly and effectively.

For support, please open a ticket within our help center system.

We offer two support models to cater to your needs:

• Standard support
• Enterprise Support

For more information, visit www.cypherlearning.com/support-and-services

Also, you can join our CYPHER Community to learn best practices, connect with CYPHER experts, and learn new ideas. Whether you opt for standard or enterprise support, you can count on us to be here, ensuring your success with our platform.

We have support teams located in the US, Latin America, the Philippines, and Europe. Through our various support teams, we make sure to cover all time zones when our customers may need help.

Yes, you can download our mobile app for academia on iOS or our mobile app for academia on Android to enjoy using CYPHER anytime, anywhere. You can also download the mobile app for business on Android or the mobile app for business on iOS.

We support all browsers on the latest two versions of Android and iOS. Our system has a responsive design so it will adapt to the size of your device's browser.

We support the current and previous release of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Each time a new browser version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third most recent version.

We currently support over 50 languages, using the Universal Translator that automatically translates in real-time. Our translation system makes it easy for volunteers to add additional languages.

Our sites have had 99.99% uptime and no data loss since we launched in 2009. View our live status anytime.

In addition, customers with a preference can choose either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure as the service hosting their instance.

At CYPHER Learning, our commitment to compliance extends across various federal and state laws, regulations, and industry standards. Key aspects of our compliance include:

• SOC 2
  • We maintain SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, with our certificate available upon request.
• AWS Technical Validation
  • We have passed the AWS Technical Validation requirements, demonstrating compliance with strict institutional controls, security policies and procedures, as well as redundancy in our operations.
• PCI
  • Our product is PCI compliant. E-commerce items such as credit card information are sent directly from the user’s browser to the payment gateway over HTTPS and never pass through our servers. We don’t store any credit card information in our database. The only thing we store is a token that is provided to us by the payment gateway provider.
• GDPR
  • CYPHER Learning is GDPR compliant, with comprehensive details available in our Data Processing Addendum.
• WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements
  • CYPHER Learning proudly adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, ensuring a user-friendly and inclusive online learning experience for all.
• HIPAA
  • HIPAA is designed primarily for protection of sensitive patient data. Since we don’t store healthcare records, HIPAA compliance is not a focus for us.
• FIPS 140-2
  • We utilize TLS 1.2+ encryption for data in transit and AES encryption for data at rest—both of which are FIPS 140-2 compliant.
• FERPA
  • We are FERPA compliant.
• PPRA
  • The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) applies to programs funded by the United States Department of Education. The PPRA protects the rights of parents and students in two ways. 
  • First, any material used by students in DoE funded surveys, analyses, or evaluations must be made available to parents prior to use by their child. Secondly, schools and contractors must acquire written parental consent before a minor student is required to participate in DoE funded surveys, analyses or evaluations which may reveal personal information.
  • As such, this information disclosure is up to the administrators of the school and is not a standard function of our platform.
• EU-US Privacy Shield
  • CYPHER Learning complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information from European Union member countries. CYPHER Learning has certified that it adheres to the EU-US Privacy Shield Privacy Principles of notice, choice, onward transfer, security, data integrity, access, and enforcement. Learn more about the EU-US Privacy Shield program.
  • We cooperate and comply with the EU Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) and the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) to investigate unresolved complaints.
• COPPA
  • The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) applies to the collection of data to persons under the age of 13. The information collected by our platform for persons under the age of 13 is at the discretion of the organizational administrators. Our privacy policy doesn't specifically address children, but each organization generally has their own privacy policy and deals with this information within their own policy framework.
  • Though we do use administrator's emails to provide feature update notifications and service/billing updates, individual learners are not contacted by us nor is their data used for any purpose other than providing service in strict accordance with the customer agreement. We protect all data, including that of those under 13, with extensive security measures as defined in this document.
  • Additionally, if granted by the organization administrator, parents can have oversight into the student's activities on the platform, which fulfills the COPPA parental oversight component.
    
• TX-RAMP Certified Fast Track with Level 1 acceptance
  • This certification highlights our compliance with the security and risk management standards required by the state of Texas for technology providers.
• ISO 27001 Compliance
  • In progress
• Visit our Trust Center page to look into security compliance and infrastructure controls.

By default, all web pages are served using HTTPS. Our Amazon cloud infrastructure is hosted in a virtual private cloud. All personal passwords are encrypted. Our e-commerce integration is PCI compliant, and financial data never even touches our servers. All access to files, such as images and videos, are via URLs that are individually encrypted for each user to prevent unauthorized sharing of resources. Our database is encrypted at rest. We perform automated vulnerability scans on our systems and source code. We perform regular penetration testing.

For details on implementation fees, please reach out to your CYPHER sales representative.

Our platform is very easy to implement in just a few simple steps. Here are the first steps when getting started with CYPHER.

Yes! Our SIS integration allows you to synchronize data such as accounts, classes, and sessions from your SIS to CYPHER without any manual intervention. Our SIS integration partner is Clever and we can also assist with a custom SIS integration if needed.

Yes! Our team of specialists and experts can assist you in migrating your existing content to our platform, including the creation of custom migration tools when appropriate.

Our expert team can deliver online training or live training at your location. All our trainers are experts with our platform. Training includes plenty of hands-on experience for all user types.

CYPHER integrates with thousands of enterprise-class applications and tools. Find out more about all our integrations.

No, we provide unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.

Our automated backup system creates an on-site and off-site copy of our database every day. In addition, we maintain secure off-site copies of every document that is uploaded to our site.

We are primarily a cloud-hosted service, which allows us to offer the site at a low cost as well as easily add new features and fix issues when they are detected. We do not provide a downloadable version for individual organizations or academic institutions, but we offer source code licensing for large companies or well-funded startups who wish to deploy our platform on a large scale.

Our servers are located in the Amazon data centers in Virginia (USA), Frankfurt (Germany), and Sydney (Australia). For customers with specialized needs, hosting can also be provided at any Microsoft Azure data center.

Our platform is built using the latest software and hardware technology. The code is written using Ruby on Rails and a small number of third-party libraries. It is hosted using Phusion Passenger Enterprise on Apache2. The system runs on the Amazon Cloud, and is designed for security and reliability. For example, there are no single points of failure in the architecture, which spans multiple availability zones. The hardware infrastructure includes the Route 53, ELB, EC2, S3, RDS, SES, ElastiCache, and CloudSearch services from Amazon.