Has your membership organization considered a third-party CE approval program?
More than just another revenue stream, education management expands your community’s professional development options and your organization’s stature within your industry. When done right, CE management nurtures a well-functioning CE marketplace and creates a virtuous cycle that improves the quality of CE offerings while optimizing your practitioners’ resources.
Is this an aspirational vision? Yes. With the right technology partner to handle the “nuts and bolts” of your approval process, you can be free to focus on what matters most: The quality and relevance of what you approve.
Third-Party CE Approval: Getting Started
As Stephen Covey once said, “Begin with the end in mind.” This is especially true when considering your organization’s role in curating your profession’s most relevant continuing education activities. As you consider your program design, it helps to zoom out. Do you know:
- Your learners’ content consumption goals: Do they want to get certified? Do they want to stay certified?
- The state of the continuing education marketplace: Are the providers reliable? Is there sufficient content to meet learners’ professional objectives?
- The current state of curation: How do your learners find high-quality content relevant and accessible?
Assessing how well the current marketplace meets your learners’ objectives helps you discern if you should set standards for education providers, courses, or both. Once you understand what’s on offer and what your learners need, you can determine an opportunity for your organization to elevate the continuing education market through targeted standards development. Once your standards are in place, you can design the process for evaluating providers and courses.
Third-Party CE Approval: Evaluation Criteria and Rigor
When it comes to approval, you may want to apply one standard of approval universally. It’s also possible that you’ll want to design different approval processes based on the level of rigor you apply to a standard.
For example, you can have one comprehensive standard, and providers can apply and get their content listed. You can also have a standard that applies more oversight to aspects of the education provider, the instructor, and the course content. You can even provide different levels of approval.
Provider Approval
How qualified are the providers currently offering continuing education in your marketplace? For many organizations, a solid foundation for growth starts with standards for continuing education providers.
Depending on your industry, you might want to include approval criteria including, but not limited to:
- Industry longevity
- Other accreditation
- Employer relationships
- Expertise
- Instructor qualifications
Pro Tip: Your program could also include the requirement that providers upload course attendance into the system, and in doing so submit course activity on your members’ behalf. Just think of all the time saved!
Course Approval
As you consider the “state of CE” in your profession, you will need to determine the value in actively curating the content available to your community. If there is value, what is the basis or criteria that you will use to determine what is worth your community’s time and resources? For professions with one or more certifications, the certification job task analysis or exam blueprint can offer insight into where practitioners may need additional education to prepare for certification. For organizations with access to certification exam scores, the domain scores may also provide insight into the areas that require additional education resources, either for initial certification or maintenance of certification.
Pro Tip: When you use certification resources to evaluate the relevance of a course offering to specific domains, you will also want your application process to categorize content to the domain.
If your goal is to provide a straightforward registry of CE activities applicable to the general profession, your application can be fairly lightweight. If your goal is to provide continuing education to professionals at later stages in their careers, you will need to create an application to gather information about the curriculum and the instructor’s qualifications. Depending on your profession, you might also want to require courses to have an assessment for credit to be granted.
In certain industries, it can be crucial to have the means to evaluate clinical evidence in support of a CE offering. For example, courses on medical procedures or pharmaceutical drugs will likely require studies to support evidence-based practice.
Pro Tip: For CE approval programs with higher-stakes content, your application review process needs to include review by subject matter experts.
Course Rejection
It’s called a CE approval program; the other side of the coin is implied and applies. When you decide to establish standards for CE, you must be able to reject submissions that don’t meet those standards. The more standards your program requires, the more rigorous your approval process will need to be. You will also need the means to ensure that evaluations or consistent across every submission.
Pro Tip: Establish an evaluations rubric for both provider and course approvals. Ensure that the rubrics are being followed in your evaluation process.
Also: Nobody likes to be rejected. Many programs will defer approval until the standard has been met instead.
Third-Party CE Approval: Optimizing the Certificant Experience
When you design your approval process and application, it can help to consider what information your members will look for in an approved course directory. To determine the best investment of their time and money, learners will likely need to know things like:
- The course location, time, and modality
- The content area covered
- Whether the course is delivered via eLearning versus in a virtual classroom
- The course proficiency level (beginner/entry-level, intermediate, or advanced)
Pro Tip: If you list a high volume or diversity of CE offerings, it can be helpful to think about search capabilities from the practitioner’s perspective: What terms and parameters will they enter into a search bar to find the CE they need?
LearningBuilder: Designed to Streamline Third-Party CE Approval Programs
At Heuristics, streamline CE management solutions to nurture the CE marketplace. Here’s how LearningBuilder software can help you hold the standards for your industry and connect your members to the CE that matters:
Configurable Applications: Collect as much information as you need, and implement the rules that govern your approval processes. Whether on the provider level or on a course-by-course basis, LearningBuilder manages application and renewal cycles with ease.
Provider Portals: Why should your staff enter data into the system when it can come straight from the source? LearningBuilder offers a direct way for providers to apply for approval and submit their evidence and documentation. Most importantly, they can upload course attendance after approval.
Reviews and Audits: Do your applications need staff review? What about review from outside experts? We use our powerful Workflow Editor to configure the processes necessary for your unique approval criteria. Our Automations Engine keeps those processes flowing with notifications and reminders. An intuitive UI and easy-to-use queues make the next steps clear and actionable.
Searchable Directories: You want to organize your approved CE. We can help. Once you approve a course, it automatically becomes searchable in your course catalog. If you have a high volume and diversity of CE offerings, LearningBuilder’s elastic search capabilities can ensure your certificants can find what they need.
Move Your Third-Party CE Approval Program Forward in 2024!
Schedule some time with us — maybe even at the upcoming ASAE Annual Meeting in Cleveland later this month — to see if our solutions fit your program needs.
