Delivering engaging learning to students and increasing faculty efficiency

Colin Christie, Director of Digital Transformation: Our challenges before CYPHER were very similar to most schools, which is certain inefficiencies in the way that we deliver value to all of our stakeholders, our students, our faculty, and the ability to really focus on 21st century learning styles. We wanted to use a LMS to make improvements in two key areas. One is the delivery of learning to our students in a very modern way and the second is to improve the efficiency of the faculty, so that they could spend less time on all the administrative duties and paperwork, and have more time available to the students.

When we were making a decision on which LMS to select, the key decision points for us that ultimately led to CYPHER were, number one, the ease of use of the platform and the user experience. We felt that was very key because without a great user experience, adoption would be challenging.

The second, of course, was the capability of the platform, to streamline and to manage courses. We also needed flexible course delivery, whether it be in-class, or blended learning, or distance learning, and we felt that CYPHER performed well in all of these areas.

Wilson Gan, Vice President of Academics: We wanted to implement blended learning and we chose CYPHER because we needed a very cost effective solution for this objective.

Colin Christie, Director of Digital Transformation: In terms of adoption of the platform, we were very pleased in that one school year over the course of two semesters, we were able to roll out CYPHER to our entire student body and all faculty. We did this in two phases. In the first semester, we did a selected, early adoptive group of faculty and classes, and then based on the learnings from that experience, we did additional training, and then by the second semester, we were able to roll out campus-wide.

Choy Arnaldo, Professor: One reason students enjoy CYPHER is because they can check their own grades, at any time, and they know the latest grade that they have, so there’s no argument what’s going to happen at the end of the mid-term.

Colin Christie, Director of Digital Transformation: Approximately one year into adoption of our platform, the feedback has been great. I’m very pleased to be stopped often in the hallways by various faculty members who say they’re really enjoying using the platform, that it’s saving them so much time, they’re able to focus more on their students.

In terms of the students, they love the fact that it’s very efficient for them to access course materials, they know where they stand at all times with their grades and assignments. So overall, we’ve really had a very positive experience with our implementation.