Why We Created the Continuing Education Catalog and Events Calendar
One thing that continuing education providers love about the Rievent Platform also happens to be something that learners love about it: the ability to easily select and access continuing education (CE) activities from a single location. All activities are listed together, so it’s easy for learners to browse what’s available.
Activity access might sound like it’s just a “learner side” feature, but that’s only half the story. While learners can browse the Rievent Platform’s CE Catalog to locate activities in which they want to participate, providers benefit from the catalog, too.
The reason? When learners self-manage CE by selecting activities via the catalog, providers don’t have to – and activity access is a big part of CE management.
The same holds true with the Events Calendar, a new tool that shows learners every available upcoming live event, webinar, or regularly scheduled series (RSS). With those details at learners’ fingertips, administrators experience fewer scheduling and participation-related challenges and field fewer questions from confused learners who want to register for an activity.
Learners aren’t confused anymore because everything they need is right there.
Things used to be a lot more difficult.
These tools – the CE Catalog and Events Calendar – don’t exist for their own sake. We created them to solve pressing problems for learners:
- Figuring out which activities were available
- Registering for those activities online
- Paying for activity access, when needed
- Browsing for specific activities based on professional focus
- Selecting activities that fit a learner’s narrow search parameters
Completing these tasks used to be difficult for learners. Providers either posted activity information to their website or, if they had some kind of learning management system, they added it there. Sometimes those systems integrated with registration and eCommerce tools. But they usually didn’t.
The problem was that providers were automating some of these tasks (or at least making them available online) but relying on manual processes for others. They and their learners needed a way to do everything via a single system.
They needed all of the functionality, and they needed it in just one place.
Enter the CE Catalog
In response to these problems, we created a straightforward, menu-style listing of every available CE activity.
The CE Catalog lets learners browse a complete listing of all available activities and identify which ones will be most relevant and convenient for them. They can browse by CE type (enduring, journal-based, etc.), profession, specialty, or search specific keywords.
This interface addresses the following challenges:
- Availability: Current availability of activities appears in each catalog listing
- Date Range: Add an activity in advance of its start date, and it won’t appear in the catalog until it’s available. Similarly, activities are automatically removed from the catalog on their end date. Providers don’t have to remove the listing manually, and learners only see what’s available, when it’s available.
- Filtering: Learners can filter search results to identify the most appropriate activities for their schedule or subject matter area.
- Registration: Learners can register for activities straight from the catalog
- Status: Labels tell learners whether they’ve already completed an activity, haven’t yet completed it, or whether it’s in progress.
All you have to do is publish the activity. After that, learners have everything they need to find and register for the right activities.
An Events Calendar picks up the slack.
Until recently, the CE Calendar lacked a tool for keeping track of live events, webinar dates, and upcoming RSS sessions. The activities were visible, and learners could register for them – the presentation just wasn’t organized in a way that made it easy to keep track of dates and times.
They also “intermingled” with non-date-specific CE activities, like enduring materials, inside the catalog, further complicating things.
That’s why we separated live, date-specific activities into a standalone Events Calendar. It’s like the CE Catalog, but for events, and it includes a “date range” tool to help learners find and register for the most convenient activities.
Everything in context
Both of these tools exist within the context of our Learning Portal, a user interface that provides everything continuing education learners need for self-management.
From the Learning Portal, learners can also see their complete participation history, print transcripts and certificates, view test scores, and access content for completed activities. The reason we group all of these tools together is to give learners a “one-stop shop” for managing their continuing education experience.
Everything is in one place. Learners don’t have to rely on multiple systems or contact administrators to complete simple tasks.
After all, that’s why we created the CE Catalog and Events Calendar – to solve a problem for learners that was also a problem for providers. With these tools at their fingertips, your learners won’t struggle to select and access continuing education activities anymore.