Top-down solutions are often touted as the first step in a CE management program. You may be mulling how to obtain buy-in from your education providers and third-party stakeholders. As an alternative, have you considered your credential holders and their perspective?
Your constituents, after all, are navigating the CE market and its offerings. They’re likely wondering:
- “Is it worth taking the day off to learn this?”
- “Would others recommend this CE?”
- “Is this CE relevant to my area of specialization?”
- “Will this CE make a meaningful or significant contribution to my professional advancement?”
If you or another organization are not currently evaluating CE, you may be wondering the same. Don’t underestimate the value of feedback from your learners. They’re the ones who are “pencils to paper” (or boots on the ground). They’re seeking out continuing education activities, usually while practicing professionally. Do you know what they’re getting out of it? Do they? What if their professional peers could help them avoid the lost opportunity cost of CE that isn’t “worth it,” and help them identify the market offerings most aligned with their professional development and goals?
Could you invite your learners to reflect on the quality and relevance of CE to their professional practice and development? Beyond a numerical rating score or NET score rating, your certificants, licensees, or diplomates can articulate what they’ve learned and how it applies to their area of practice. Feedback and reflective evaluation help “crowdsource” quality, relevance, and specificity within the market. It can also encourage deeper, more considered engagement with the learning material.
Crowdsourcing CE for Quality
Your practitioners are taking time out of their busy schedules to meet their continuing education requirements. Since they’re seeking the most “bang for their buck,” it’s worth knowing what they think of their investment. So, as they submit their activities for approval, it’s worth asking: Was the course well-designed? Were the materials easy to access and understand? Was the content delivered effectively? Their answers will demonstrate whether an offering creates predictable, desirable learning outcomes. As you define your standards for quality, you can tailor your feedback requests to those standards.
Crowdsourcing CE for Relevance and Domain Alignment
Even pre-approved CE may not be assessed for relevance to your program’s specialty domain or sub-domain area. Offerings may instead focus on clinical evidence in practice, for example. What if learners could situate their CE within their program’s specific content domains?
Constituent feedback may also help you “cast a wider net” for what CE you approve. For example, a learner may seek out CE relevant to the specific workplace where they practice. If it does not fall within the domains of their credential, they can explain its relevance to their KSAs and professional advancement. Their feedback makes the case (or not) for that CE’s value to others.
Using Learner Feedback to Build a CE Course Catalog
As you gather feedback, aligned and high-value activities will emerge through consensus. Before long, you’ll have a community-curated collection of peer-vetted learning content. With the right tools, you can organize that content to specific domain areas. You can even make it searchable for future learners!
Enhanced Engagement through Reflective Evaluation
Reflection can positively affect the learning process and contribute to the goals of your recertification program. Reflective evaluation requires learners to internalize the material and describe its relevance to their practice. They can’t just skim it or speed through it to check off their requirement. Instead, they engage with the learning more deeply. As part of that process, they articulate its impact on their professional work.
LearningBuilder Empowers Constituent Feedback and Reflection
LearningBuilder’s built-in feedback tools make it easy to evaluate ongoing satisfaction with CE. You can also create structured prompts for reflective responses in paragraph form. Our Assessment Engine expands on these capabilities while our Reporting Module makes your data accessible and actionable. When your system does the work, the feedback flows, engagement deepens, and the cream of the CE market rises to the top.
Are you looking to improve or expand your CE management solutions? We can help move you forward! Schedule an exploratory call with us to discover the LearningBuilder difference.
