Overview

Instructors and teachers are responsible for the creation, management and teaching of online content.

CYPHER for business defaults to the Instructor role. CYPHER for academia defaults to the Teacher role. The terms instructor and teacher are interchangeable in this article and customizable in your platform.

Creating a course or class

Instructors are responsible for creating courses/classes, which include modules or lessons, assessments, resources, and optional competencies and skills. You can create courses from scratch or copy an existing course and customize it. Courses can be instructor-led, self-paced or blended.

CYPHER for business defaults to courses. CYPHER for academia defaults to classes. The terms course and class are interchangeable in this article and customizable in your platform.

Writing a syllabus

Once you've created a course you can add an optional syllabus that provides a good overview of what the course will cover. You can also create a course schedule that automatically populates the course calendar with scheduled modules.

Using the course news feed

The main page for a course is a news feed that shows all the latest items such as new modules or lessons, assignments, and calendar events. In addition, you can post announcements and messages to the feed. You can also configure the course to allow learners to post messages to the feed, which encourages course interaction that is visible to all members of the course.

Adding co-instructors or co-teachers

You can add optional co-instructors/co-teachers that have access to all the instructor functions except the ability to delete the course. You can also transfer ownership of the course to another instructor.

Enrolling learners and students

There are three ways to enroll learners into a course. You can pass out the course ID and password and allow learners to enroll themselves, email invitations, enroll them directly from your business roster, or you can enroll learners using the people picker.

CYPHER for business defaults to learners. CYPHER for academia defaults to students. The terms learner and student are interchangeable in this article and customizable in your platform.

Creating modules or lessons

The modules are the core content of the course. Each module is comprised of one or more sections, and a section can be HTML, an industry-standard SCORM module, or an assignment. An assessment can be configured to have a completion threshold so that learners can only progress to subsequent modules if they score at least a minimum number of points.

CYPHER for business defaults to modules. CYPHER for academia defaults to lessons. The terms modules and lessons are interchangeable in this article and customizable in your platform.

Setting assessments or assignments

There are a rich set of assessment types to choose from, including quizzes, surveys, freeform essays, offline, team, discussions, and debates. Learners can also earn points based on their attendance. Everything is 100% online, which makes it easy to give assessments, track submissions, and perform grading.

CYPHER for business defaults to assessments. CYPHER for academia defaults to assignments. The terms assessments and assignments are interchangeable in this article and customizable in your platform.

Grading assessments or assignments

The course grading scale is initialized with a copy of the business's standard grading scale. You can override the settings if you wish. All grading is done online and you can see the grades on a per-assignment basis on via the Gradebook. You can also export grades in a spreadsheet format and obtain PDF printouts.

Using rubrics

The site has seamless support for rubrics, which allow you to grade assignments quickly and consistently. You can create rubrics, store them into a library for reuse, and share them with other instructors in your business or network.

Tracking competencies

If you associate a course with a set of competencies, you can tag its module with the competencies that they teach and its assessments with the competencies that they assess. Then you can automatically analyze how well the course covers its competencies and track the progress of each learner by competency. In addition, a learner can see how well they are progressing through the competencies associated with the course.

Taking attendance

You can track learner attendance for a particular course session, including whether a learner arrives on time, arrives late, leaves early, or is absent. You can also excuse a learner and include a note. You can award points for attendance by adding one or more attendance assignments.

Using portfolios

Portfolios allow learners to keep a record of their best work in order to showcase it for their instructors, managers, and others. Each learner has a portfolio that is independent of a particular course and can be organized into folders. They can add copies of resources and assignments to their portfolio for future use.

Prerequisite certificates and completion certificates

You can specify one or more certificates that a learner must have in order to enroll in the course. Similarly, you can specify one or more certificates that a learner is automatically awarded when they complete the course.

Awarding certificates

Certificates may be awarded to learners for achieving a particular level of competence and can have an optional expiry date.

Analytics

Analytics allows you to view and analyze useful information such as the progress of your learners through your modules, how much time they're spending in each course, and grade distribution on the assignments. You can disable analytics if desired.

Teaching multiple sessions

This site includes special support for teaching multiple sessions of the same course. To do this, you can add 'child' courses to a 'parent' course. Each course can be independently customized, and you can update the children with changes made to the parent.

E-commerce

You can set the price of a course as well as optional discount codes. Visitors can browse through your courses and purchase them with a credit card or Paypal.

Configuring the course or class

You can configure almost every aspect of a course, including whether the course is published to the course catalog, its price (if e-commerce is enabled), which collaboration features are enabled, whether learners can post to the news feed, how grades are displayed, assignment categories, the weighting scheme, and assignment notifications.

Backing up the course or class

You can export a course for offline access or backup purposes. An exported course includes its overview, resources, modules, and assignments, together with any files it references.

Deactivating the course or class

You can deactivate courses that are no longer active. They don't show up the list of courses you're teaching or in the school's list of courses, but you can still access their modules, assignments, and grades.

Best practices

There are several best practices we recommend, such as keeping your course and module descriptions short, using plenty of video and audio, and taking advantage of rubrics and competencies.