College Of Continuing Education
Q: I have been taking some computer courses on my agency's website. The site
says it offers CEU's but I don't exactly know what that means. Can anybody
explain what CEU's are and whether they can be used towards undergraduate
and graduate degrees?
A:The CEU is a "Continuing Education Unit," which is used for professional
and continuing education courses. One CEU equals ten clock hours of
contact time. While it is usually frowned upon to grant partial CEU's,
it is quite common to see them expressed as a decimal. Thus, an
eight-hour workshop or seminar would equal 0.8 CEU's, a 15-hour workshop
or seminar is 1.5 CEU's, etc.
Over the past few years, CEU's have begun to be used for alternative
delivery methods such as online, correspondence, or other external means
of pursuing continuing education. In these cases, the CEU is calculated
based on the amount of time estimated for someone to complete a course.
Thus, if you see an online course offering 1.5 CEU's, that represents
the 15 clock hours the average person would take to complete it.
CEU's are not regulated; although there are professional organizations
that develop standards for continuing education and for CEU's
(especially with regard to documentation and records maintenance), those
standards are not mandatory. CEU's also represent only one type of
continuing education credit; in specific professions, there are specific
types of continuing education credits (such as CME's in medicine, CLE's
in law, and various units of credit offered in psychology and
counseling). Any entity can claim to offer CEU's; the question becomes
whether a state agency or professional organization will accept those
credits. (For example, the XYZ Education Center can purport to offer
CEU's, but that does not necessarily mean they will be accepted by
professional organizations such as the APA for psycholgists, the NBCC
for professional counselors, or any state regulatory agency.)
Finally, for better or worse, the answer to your second question is no -
CEU's do not represent, nor can they be equated with, credit toward
college or university degrees. Academic credit is measured in semester
hours or, less frequently, quarter hours. The semester hour represents
one hour spent in class per week for 15 weeks, plus twoout-of-class
hours that might eb applied to reading, research, writing, etc. Thus,
the average three-credit college course translates to three hours in
class per week for one semester, plus two additional hours per week for
the other stuff. In nontraditional degree programs, one semester hour
of credit is granted for each 45 hours of work, regardless of what form
it takes; thus, for a three-credit computation, you would estimate
spending 135 hours of work on a subject. (The formula for conversion is
that a quarter hour credit is based on a 10-week quarter rather than a
15-week semester. Therefore, one quarter-hour equals two-thirds of a
semester hour, and one semester hour equals one-and-a-half times the
quarter hour.)
Despite the fact that CEU's do not translate *directly* into college
credits, however, you can use your CEU-based learning to earn college
credit through the portfolio process at schools such as Thomas Edison
State College, Charter Oak State College, or Excelsior College. To see
how the portfolio process works, you can read the three articles in the
TESC section of my home page. The CEU-based learning would simply be
one way of documenting your knowledge for a portfolio-based credit
submission.
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