How to Decide the Format of Your Continuing Education: Live Seminar, Webinar, or Online Course
Planning how you’re going to offer continuing education (CE) credits is one of the most important steps in the process. Perhaps you’ve taken a live seminar, webinar, or online course yourself, but haven’t considered which might be the right choice for your content.
We’ll walk you through the different options for mental health professionals and help you determine which is the best format for you. Plus, you’ll get a look behind the scenes at what goes into creating a webinar, seminar, or course that meets APA standards.
Types of Continuing Education
The four primary types of programs you’ll encounter most often as a mental health CE content creator are live seminars, live webinars, workshops, recorded webinars, and online courses. Depending on the length of your offering, you may also see them referred to interchangeably as workshops, trainings, courses, or classes. It’s important to know how each is defined, however, so that you use the correct term when advertising your content.
Other terms you’ll want to distinguish between are live and distance offerings. This is where it gets a bit murky, especially with the rise in remote learning and teaching.
According to the APA, live includes both in-person and online offerings and requires participant interaction with the instructor. Distance refers to non-interactive or recorded content that is often self-paced. Live offerings require full attendance while distance offerings require the instructor to provide a quiz or post-test to ensure participants meet APA standards for CE credits.
Webinar
A webinar is a great option for someone who isn’t sure about hosting a full seminar or course (we’ll define those in a minute). You can either present a webinar live online or pre-recorded.
Webinars can last between 60-90 minutes and make space for a question and answer session at the end. In the mental health field, however, we’ve seen some webinars take place over a few days and provide up to six hours of content per day. It’s up to you to determine how long you’d like your webinar to last!
Due to time constraints, webinars are typically best suited for overviews of topics or presenting a wide range of information that doesn’t go too in-depth. Participants who sign up for a webinar may be looking for general information about a subject before taking a more intensive course.
Some pros of offering a webinar are little to no overhead costs and no limit on the number of participants, the ability to record on demand, and a minimal creation effort. All you need is an internet connection and a computer or mobile device. The challenges of offering a webinar often amount to technical issues, such as a weak WiFi connection or a participant’s audio not working.
Workshop
While a webinar takes place online, provides broad information, and can be recorded, workshops are interactive and provide an in-depth, hands-on learning experience. Instructors tend to prefer offering workshops in-person due to their collaborative nature but they can also be offered online. If you have a particular skill you’d like to teach, such as EMDR, offering a workshop may be a good option for you.
Benefits of offering a workshop are similar to those of a webinar when offered online, but with fewer technical issues when offered in-person. If you choose to host a workshop in-person, however, you’ll have to account for the cost of renting space, refreshments, and other materials for participants like handouts and guides.
Live Seminar
Seminars are in-person offerings where people in a community, such as social workers or nurses, can gather and discuss a particular topic. In a workshop, you may learn practical, hands-on skills (doing), but in a seminar, the focus shifts to instruction and knowledge-sharing (learning). Because they are in-person, seminars rely less on technical support and therefore you’ll run into fewer technical issues. Some challenges of offering a seminar are again the cost to rent space, a limit to the number of tickets you can sell (dependent on the size of your space), providing refreshments, and an attendee pool constrained to a local area and your specific community.
Online Course
An online course provides in-depth information about a particular topic in the mental health field and includes multiple lessons. Sometimes people will first offer a webinar or workshop and turn the content into a pre-recorded online course. Providing an online course takes more time and effort than the other offerings, though if you have extensive knowledge of a topic that would be hard to summarize in a shorter training, it may be a good option for you. It’s also an opportunity to create a passive income that allows you to focus on other endeavors, such as your practice or spending more time with your family.
Some Choose to Do Everything!
One of our customers, EMDR & Beyond, specializes in offering live seminars for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). They offer streaming options for their live seminars so that anyone can attend online which, in many cases, doubles their revenue potential. It’s a unique way to take advantage of hosting both local audiences and an unlimited number of participants online. And, more often than not, they’re able to repurpose the recording of the live seminar to turn it into an online course.
How to Choose the Right Training for You
It can be helpful to first determine which format you’d like to use to offer CE credits before coming up with the material for your program. By choosing between a workshop, webinar, seminar, or course, you can then determine length (minimum of 1 hour), learning objectives, and content. You will need to achieve one learning objective for each instructional hour of your continuing education program. This process makes it easier to match up content within a predetermined amount of time instead of the other way around. It’s also a beneficial way to emphasize your learning objectives to make sure you’re meeting APA content standards.
Here are a few things you can ask yourself if you’re struggling to make a decision:
Are you comfortable with technology?
Are you comfortable speaking in front of a live audience?
Does the content you’ll teach require hands-on exercises to learn properly?
Do you have a local audience?
Do you want to instruct a small or large group of people?
How much will your continuing education cost to provide?
Take time to explore available offerings in your subject area to see whether one type of format is more popular than another and what you think participants will be most likely to sign up for. It’s important to consider both your comfortability and your participant’s preferred methods of learning before deciding which format to offer your content in for CE credits.
We know there’s a lot to consider when offering CE credits for mental health professionals. That’s why we created a free online course to help you get started. Submit your email and receive access to an online course that includes what you need to know (and some extra tips) as a CE provider.