Blog Article

Six Steps to Submitting CEU Calculations

The most cited benefit of accreditation with IACET is the ability to issue IACET CEUs to your learners.  The accredited provider or AP provides IACET CEUs to learners that meet stated requirements for earning CEUs.  As a part of the accreditation process (both for the initial and for renewals), organizations must show how they calculate the CEUs that the learning events are worth.

There are very few prescriptive parts of the standard, but the CEU calculations must be done correctly and accurately.  The process you use to calculate CEUs must be well documented. The six steps detailed below will help you to create the documentation needed to demonstrate that your organization correctly calculates the IACET CEUs that your learner earn for the learning events you offer.

There are six easy steps to success in submitting the CEU calculations for accreditation.

1. Review the Standard element that requires the CEU calculation evidence – Element 6.4 in the ANSI/IACET Standard 1-2018 for Continuing Education and Training. The standard states that "the provider shall have a process for calculating and recording the IACET CEU for learning events." The initial application goes on to give the guidance:

 

 

Ensure that the process documents how the organization calculates the CEUs for initial (new learning events) and the maintenance of existing learning events.  The process should also include the different methodologies for counting CEUs based on the delivery methods used.  You wouldn't count CEUs the same way for both a distance and live in-person event.

2. Review the resource document The Continuing Education Unit, How to Calculate CEUS.  The paper found at this link provides much of the needed rationale for which moments in the learning events would qualify for inclusion in the total CEU count.  IACET generously considers the moments, lessons, or activities that are of educational value.
3. Create a worksheet for the sample learning event(s) that will give the reviewers full transparency into what you have included in the CEU count and what you have subtracted from the total time used to calculate the CEU.

 

 

4. For each activity, moment or lesson that you have included in the CEU count ensure that it is a part of the design document for that course:

 

 

5. SHOW THE MATH. If you use a worksheet as suggested in step 3, you will have to show the calculations and not just the total number of CEUs. The commissioners want to see that you have subtracted out the breaks and lunches and that you have calculated everything correctly, and that means….
6. ROUND to the nearest 10th.  The CEU total should only have one digit after the decimal point.  2.2 CEUs NOT 2.18.  Also, make sure that you round up, meaning that if the total ends in 5 or higher, you round up to the next number.  So, 2.18 becomes 2.2.

Since the total number of CEUs can never be less than .1, this means that a course which is 30 minutes long would have the following calculation:

30min/60 = .5.à .5/10 = .05 à  round to the nearest 10th and your 30-minute learning event is .1 CEU. 

So, in strict adherence to the IACET Standard, no one single IACET CEU learning event should be less than 30 minutes long.  An organization can have groupings of smaller learning events to get to the total of 30 minutes or more, but no learning event should be less than .1 CEU.