Continuing Education Units (ceu's)

Q: I am currently involved in establishing a school operating over the net specializing in short, non-credit, post-secondary, courses, primarily vocational in nature. I have seen a number of seminars, short courses, etc that have statements such as "6 Continuing Education Units (CEU's) awarded upon successful completion of this course. The CEU seems to be a fairly widespread term. Is there an organization that "accredits" or certifies continuing ed courses and determines the number of CEU's appropriate?

A:The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) represents a method of measuring non-credit education that can be counted toward fulfillment of professional or continuing education requirements. One CEU is *universally* interpreted as ten *contact* hours of learning. For example, when used in the context of professional seminars, a six-clock-hour seminar would carry 0.6 CEU's. Personal study time is *not* included in the calculation of CEU's; credit is granted *only* for contact hours. Thus, a statement such as "6 CEU's granted..." would indicate that the course included 60 contact hours. There used to be an organization called the Council for the Continuing Education Unit that would, in fact, certify organizations that offered professional and continuing education courses, but the requirements were quite stringent and the organization would have to have offered courses (and granted CEU's) for quite some time before acceptance by the Council. Another requirement was that the sponsoring (training) organization keep a record of CEU's granted based on the students' Social Security number. (This may have been changed due to various privacy laws, in the same way that colleges no longer use an SSN as a student I.D. number.) The Council changed its name a few years back, and I'm afraid that I don't recall the new name. Nonetheless, *anyone* can grant CEU's - there is no requirement for certification or membership in any organization to do so. Some professional organizations (such as the American Counseling Association) have made audio or video courses available for which they grant CEU's. The usual procedure is to calculate the number awarded based on the length of the tapes or the average time it would take to read the study materials. (Contact hours are not used since the courses are taken by extension.) Professions such as law, medicine, psychology, and counseling also have continuing professional education requirements. The rules for each profession are normally established on a state-by- state basis and, in addition to CEU's, credit can be expressed as CME's (for continuing medical education), CLE's (continuing legal education), etc. Measurement of professional credits may be based on the CEU standard of one credit per ten clock hours, or the credits may be expressed as actual hours. Neither CEU's nor any other type of professional credits normally translate into academic credit toward a degree, unless a course has specifically been evaluated and approved by the American Council on Education (whose standards are used by regionally accredited schools such as Edison and Regents). Finally, CEU's may be granted under any circumstance, although they will not necessarily count toward the number of hours required for continuing education in a specific profession. This is why one will often see statements in workshop or seminar brochures such as, "This workshop has been approved for

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