The number of CEUs provided for a continuing education event for Board Certified Behavior Analysts must adhere to the guidelines established by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board:
Each event must include a minimum of 25 minutes of instruction, for which 0.5 CEUs are awarded. Additional CEUs should be awarded in increments of .5 (25 minutes of instruction) or 1.0 (50 minutes of instruction). For example, 50 minutes = 1 CEU; 75 minutes = 1.5 CEUs; 100 minutes = 2 CEUs; and so on. Rounding up is not permitted when issuing CEUs.
These guidelines make perfect sense for live, in-person, and synchronous learning events. They are less clear for the on-demand, self-paced, and asynchronous learning events that we publish. There can be a lot of variability in completion time when dealing with self-paced content, particularly if it involves mastery learning or adaptive instruction (as most of our modules do). For example, we have some modules that some people complete in 3 hours, but other people complete in 10 hours.
In determining the number of CEUs we provide for our modules, we try to strike a balance between the expected time to completion and the amount of content or number of objectives covered. Several data points factor into our calculations:
- The amount of text to be read (or listened to)
- The length of any videos or other media elements included
- The number of interactions required during practice activities or assessment
- Historical time-to-completion data recorded by our system for previous users of the module
- Self-reported time-to-completion data reported by previous users of the module
We have considered awarding credit based on actual time to completion, but there are two key problems with that. The first problem is that accurately measuring time to completion in a self-paced, online format is pretty difficult. We still try to do it (you may notice a “are you still here?” prompt pop up occasionally while you’re working on our modules), but there are serious limitations to consider. The second problem is that it punishes learning quickly and reinforces learning slowly. Someone who can complete a module and master its content in just 3 hours would only get about 3.5 CEUs, whereas someone who takes 10 hours to complete it would earn 12 CEUs. That doesn’t seem fair and raises a related problem of how to sell and price an event without a predetermined number of CEUs to be awarded.
Thus, we do our best to standardize the number of CEUs available per module in accordance with the BACB’s guidelines by using the best evidence we have available to us. If you ever disagree with the number of CEUs awarded for a module, please let us know by completing the survey at the end of every module (there is a question on it specifically about whether the number of CEUs offered seems appropriate).
Do you have any suggestions of other strategies we should use to determine the number of CEUs for our modules? If you are a provider of self-paced, asynchronous CEUs, how do you determine the number of CEUs to offer?
