If the hosting organization is offer CEU credits for an course/workshop, the event itself could be flagged for CEU credits at a certain level, i.e., the number of CEUs is set by the administrator as part of setting up the registration page.

When attendance is confirmed - and here a new functionality would be needed on the event page or attached to the specific registration - the in-house administrator clicks a button that says "Attendance confirmed", and the individual's CEUs are recorded.

CEUs can be accumulated in many different ways, and not just from the host organization. For instance, a professional association for engineers will accept and record CEU credits when the member submits documentary evidence of having attended a course elsewhere. If I were a member of that organization, I would want to be sure that I can see the CEU credits accumulating. If I was a manager from the association side, I would want the capacity to post credits no matter where they come from, once they are documented.

Actually, thinking this through, this would be the best way to administer the CEUs earned by any practitioner - have the association administrator post the credits based on documents submitted. I would want to add to the fields suggested earlier, the instructor who delivered the content. Another, optional field, might include the acronym letters of the associations to whom the CEUs would be relevant. (maybe this is reaching a bit....)

Hi Lora. We haven't planned this feature yet and there is no chance that we can do here anything until April 2014

Good afternoon,

Adding a way to track CEUs for members at conventions is VERY important to our association. Our members are required to get CEUs to keep their professional licenses. Our Board currently has to report these CEUs to both a State and National licensing organization. Other associations such as ours use barcode scanners to collect the names of attendees at each CEU class given at a yearly convention. There may be five classes given at the convention. Some attendees will attend all five. Other attendees will only attend one or two, depending on how many CEUs they need.

I would like to see a way to utilize a bar scanner to input when a member attends a specific class and have that go directly into their profile so that they can print out or view not only the number of CEUs they have, but the name of the class they attended as well.

It would also be important to be able to export this information to an Excel spreadsheet because that is the required format used for reporting to our National association.

I would love to hear from you on the status of this request. Our annual convention is in April of 2014. It would be nice to have this tool. I have been really pleased with Wild Apricot's member management tools, but to be honest, I have started looking at other software that may also incorporate this feature.

I would just like to pipe in and say that my association is also interested in this module to track continuing education points. We will likely go with another CRM database because this particular functionality is not available with Wild Apricot; other than this and another issue with multiple language capability, we'd be so on board as your client. (We are a Canadian organization and need to be able to provide service to Quebec members in French.) We just love the look and feel of the user interface.

We've had to research other options and the "Continuing Professional Development" and "Accreditation Manager" modules come standard with other CRM software companies. So what we're looking for is pretty standard:

* - for us, only a sub-set of our membership have a 'designation' that requires them to accummulate a certain number of points every two years
* - the administrator needs to be able to assign points to every event we offer
* - when the member signs up for an event, these pre-assigned points are attributed and recorded to their record
* - volunteer activities such as being on the Board or a committee is also eligible for points, so if we mark down that a member is part of the Board, a set number of education points are attributed to their record
* - we can run reports to see how many points members have
* - like member renewals, based on the number of points they have from whatever set time period, members are sent automatic reminder emails to beef up those points to meet the minimum requirement
* - members, when logging into their personal page, can see how many points they have.
* - Non-Association events/activities that are eligible for points: we also need the member to be able to input events they've attended outside of our association that we would give them credit for. So the administrator would have the ability to create pre-set "general" events with pre-assigned points. Members can log in, choose one of these 'pre-set' events and would then provide additional details including title of event, date of the event and other comments.
* - Auditing members: other reporting functions could include the ability for the module to allow the administrator to choose a percentage of members that could generate a report on random members for the administrator to do an audit on. The report would include the points the members are claiming, company name and contact number so that the administrator can do random audits.

Yes, I also look forward to a more automated CE module that allows members to input how and when they took a seminar (or whatever) with the CE value of that seminar (course, class, test, workshop, convention), a math function, and then have the CE module either prevent renewal due to lack of the required number of CE hours or enable the renewal once the CE hours requirements have been satisfied.

In our case, members need 5 hours of CE to renew. If they attend a workshop that credits them with 10 hours, they will use up 5 of those hours for current renewal and then be able to "save" the remaining 5 hours that will satisfy the next year's CE requirements as well.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

Pat, no, it has not been implemented - that's why it is still here on the Wishlist forum.

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.

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

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.

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

I see, thank you for the details.

I would really aprpeciate if other users would weigh in on this.

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