Tracking Continuing Education Points (CEU, CEC, CPD, CPU)
There is currently no special functionality for tracking Continuing Education points/credits in Wild Apricot. It is possible to track these via custom admin-only fields but this requires manual process. We are considering adding this functionality in the future and would appreciate details on how these are typically tracked by our clients.
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Lora Zachek Administrator Acct commented
Hi, our organization works like yours with a number of continuing education requirements met *BEFORE* membership can be renewed. Members are always calling and asking if they have enough CE credits to renew their license, etc. I would like to see WA set up a separate db/tracking with some functions such as when a certain number is reached, renewal becomes available. Also, for logged in users, they could look up their CE records and determine what they need in order to renew their license. I have a manual form and then update a spreadsheet and send them a "Notice of Satisfaction" notice that they are now certified to renew their license. Did you figure something out that would be workable and you could share? Thanks ccr@ccrboard.com Gayle Kinsey
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Dmitry Buterin commented
Another comment received:
" For our association, we have two conferences per yer with several different sessions each. Each session has a certain number of hours. We also give our members credit for attendance at a few outside events. Once members reach 40 hours of training, they get a certificate and another at 100 hours. After they reach the 40 hours (as well as 100 hours) they are required to have 16 hours every two years to maintain their certification.
The awarding of the certificate and minimum hours is our concern to worry about. We would like for Apricot to have the ability to enter hours. For example, an new tab for each member/contact called something like Attendance or Education with the following fields at a minimum.
Event Name - Event Date - Session Description - Hours/Units
There are other fields as well that would be helpful to us. Somehow this would need to be able to be displayed to the member when they log in.
It would be great if we could mass import this information. We use an attendance tracker (small USB scanner) that scans attendees' name badges at the beginning of each session. So when we are done, we have detailed attendance list.We could import that." -
Larry Killer commented
Dmitry,
I am working with my board members to come up with a list of features we would like to see as well as the workflow that envision using. I will post this information as soon as we have it.
Thank you for responding back and for keeping this on the wishlist. I do see it being a valuable tool for many organizations.
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Dmitry Buterin commented
Larry - what we would really love to get at this point is a bullet point of what are the key features needed/workflow envisioned for tracking these.
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Larry Killer commented
I would like to bump this topic back up. Our organization is very interested in being able to track education points for our members. Has there been any additional thought on applying this topic becoming a possible reality in a near future upgrade? It seems that there may be a lot of interest in this, so I would ask other users interested in tracking education points to chime in as well.
Thank you.
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Dmitry Buterin commented
Pat, no, it has not been implemented - that's why it is still here on the Wishlist forum.
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Pat Green commented
I know that this thread is very old but just wondered if the continuing education credit tracking function was ever implemented. Thanks in advance for the information.
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Justin Loranger commented
I'd be happy to give you an example, as it pertains to our organization.
In our case, licensed members and licensed non-members would attend an event. The event would be assigned an certain number of CEUs.
So you would need to track who attended, what was the event, number of CEUs. That, I think would be fairly straight forward, since you already track event attendance.
Secondly, you also need to be able to track CEUs obtained from events sponsored by another entity. So you would need to be able to enter the same information, as above, for a contact manually. This would need to be an administrative task, since you do not want contacts to be able update CEUs that are not valid.
In my mind, it would be a separate table tracking CEUs information for the contacts.
Lastly, and probably, most importantly, you will need to be able to report on either one contact or all contacts what their current level of CEUs are. This will need to be reported to the contacts and to the licensing body, in our case the State of Maine.
Example: my license was renewed on July 1, 2008. I need to earn 10 CEUs within the next year, in order to renew my license. I have attended two events and have earned 4 CEUs since July 1. The report would show how many CEUs I have earned since July 1. Any class before that date would not count.
Kind of a long winded answer, but hope this helps. I'd be happy to expanded on any of this if you would like.
Regards,
Justin Loranger
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Dmitry Buterin commented
Justin,
Our current reporting system can not do what you have describeвб sorry.
Given that CEU is a common thing for many associations and associations is the largest segment of non-profits for our platform, I would appreciate more details on how this should ideally work - and then we come up with ways to deal with it - via new custom functionality or tweaking existing functions to enable a decent workaround.
In any case, in the short term we do not have a good way to support tracking CEUs - so this will have to be done with manual workarounds.
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Justin Loranger commented
I have another thought about making this work, without really knowing your product. Which, by the way, seems to be the best of it's breed both in functionality and pricing, from what I can see so far in my research.
Anyway...
Can you have custom fields for an event, say CEU and and expiration date? Then I could report against an a member and see what events they have attended and calculate their CEUs from that.
So my real question, is how robust is your reporting? Can I run a report against members to see what events they have attended? Can I modify/customize a report to perform calculations, including date math?
Regards,
Justin
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Dmitry Buterin commented
I see, thank you for the details.
I would really aprpeciate if other users would weigh in on this.
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Justin Loranger commented
Good morning.
We are not currently a subscriber, but we may be looking for a solution in the near future. But, similar to the original poster, the requirements would be...
We are a professional organization where each member is required to be licensed by the state in order to provide professional services for a fee. There is a change proposed, by our state, that would require each person licensed to obtain a certain number of "continuing education credits" (CEUs) in order to maintain their license. I would need to be able to track what class was taken on what date and how many credits were earned for it. These credits would also expire after some period of time, one-three years possibly.
I am thinking of a table with 6 columns, the member, the class, date of class, credits earned, expiration date, and an ID field.
I would be happy to provide any additional detail you want. This service looks like a promising choice for our organization, should the state (Maine) make the proposed changes.
Best regards,
Justin Loranger
Maine Arborist Association