ONLINE CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT
by Erik Jay
The online continuing education credit (also known as Continuing Education Unit, or CEU) is simply the same kind of CEU that people used to earn through other “distance learning” programs that predate the Internet. The CEU evolved over the years in the American educational establishment as a way of measuring and rewarding the amount of ongoing education needed in professions whose practices and procedures were susceptible to becoming quickly obsolete.
A perfect example of the need for continuing education is the field of medicine. If you were to be treated for, say, HIV by a physician who graduated from medical school in 1980, before the discovery of the virus, your prognosis would not be very good — assuming the doctor could even make an accurate diagnosis first. The health care field, then, was one of the first groups of professions for which the government, professional groups (like the American Medical Association) and educators came together to establish continuing education requirements. Today, of course, that credit can be earned online.
Of course, before the rise of the Internet and the growth of online colleges, earning continuing education credit was accomplished through on-campus classes or the first “distance learning” correspondence courses. Taking a correspondence course of any kind, much less for continuing education, meant a serious lag time in lesson grading, testing and awarding of earned units.
Next came correspondence courses with audio cassettes, then videos — and all the while, from the beginning of the television era in the late 1940s, educators attempted to get TV “tuned in” to the higher education picture, with mixed results. It wasn’t until the advent of the World Wide Web that truly effective distance learning methods were achieved. Earning continuing education credit online is now a smooth, easy and time-tested method for staying abreast of the latest advances in one’s chosen profession.
Written as work-for-hire for CK Media, which company therefore holds all rights to the article. |
