Do You Want to Learn About CPD Accreditation for Your Courses?
Do you want to learn about CPD accreditation for your courses?
In this article we’ll look at the benefits of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) accreditation and share some of the things we’ve learnt from completing the process with our courses.
Benefits of CPD Accreditation
CPD accreditation gives your learners confidence in the quality of your training because:
- It has been verified by a professional review.
- The course is based on recognised standards.
- CPD-accredited courses deliver significant results that can lead to career progression.
- It helps your training material stand out in a crowded market.
What is CPD Accreditation?
The CPD Group accredited our courses. Please find below high-level information on The CPD Course A.C.C.R.E.D.I.T.E.D Framework from their website.
Accessibility
The CPD Group recognises the importance of courses being accessible to all learners. That's why accessibility is an integral part of the framework and something that is taken into account when assessing your individual courses.
Content
Content is key. Our Accreditation and Compliance Team thoroughly check the content of your course to ensure that the information you have provided is factually correct, relevant and up-to-date.
Creative
It's one thing to have great content. But it's how you deliver this content that will make or break a learner's experience!
The Accreditation and Compliance Team are looking to see how your courses are delivered to your learners and whether they are likely to remain engaged throughout.
Relevant
Is the content within your training materials relevant to the subject? Do your handouts reflect the content that has been delivered throughout the session?
It's really important that your content is relevant and flows seamlessly throughout, this ensures that your learners are getting exactly what they expected upon purchasing your course.
Eligibility
Ensuring that the right people are attracted to your offer is vital when promoting your courses.
Prerequisites are a way of making sure that students meet the eligibility criteria and enrol onto a course or subject with some prior knowledge. It might be that your course has no prerequisites to enrolment, which is perfectly fine, but our Accreditation and Compliance Team will be interested to know if there are any.
All good things to cover to ensure you are aiming at the right market and attracting the right people.
Details
The devil is in the details! The Accreditation and Compliance Team examines the smallest details to ensure your course is entirely accurate, easily understandable and adheres to professional writing standards.
Are you including up-to-date references where applicable? Are these references reliable, from a credible source? Is your spelling and grammar correct? If your learners are going to take your course seriously, they’ll expect to see well-written sentences, correct punctuation and fantastic grammar.
Intellectual Property
We cannot emphasise enough how important it is that you own or are licensed to use the materials you are offering.
The Accreditation and Compliance Team check that the content has been truthfully and legitimately produced, looking out for clear indications of plagiarised content.
Tested
How do you test your learner's competency?
An effective course will contain some form of assessment that enables the learner to solidify the knowledge they have gained and validate their progress.
Expertise
An excellent course will benefit from its creator being fully clued up on their specialist subject.
The Accreditation and Compliance Team will always check that the author of the course possesses the relevant knowledge and experience in creating the activity effectively.
Duration
After our Accreditation and Compliance Team assess your course(s), and prior to them being submitted to The CPD Register, our Assessors will assign a number of CPD CREDITS to the course to help people record their ongoing CPD.
CPD CREDITS are worked out as 1 hour of study = 1 CPD CREDIT, so establishing the correct number of hours, on average, students take to complete the course, including any ‘Home Study’, is vital to ensure the correct number of CPD CREDITS are allocated to each individual activity.
This helps employers set and monitor CPD Targets, while offering individuals a clear way of evidencing their ongoing development.
For more detail and some very useful videos, please go to CPD Course
Accreditation Framework, CPD Assessment, CPD Reviewed, CPD Standards
It is possible to obtain accreditation for:
- Instructor-led classroom courses
- Workshops
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Conferences
- Online training
- E-learning
- Live events
- Editorial learning.
What are the Prerequisites for Course Accreditation?
Before you can request course accreditation, you’ll need approved provider status. Please find below information from The CPD Group on this.
What's the Benefit of being an Approved Provider?
They say the best things in life are free! Our brilliant CPD Providers receive a range of free benefits, such as joining the first, and currently only, ‘Certified’ CPD Accreditation organisation in the world, opening the door to activity accreditation, and more:
- Unique CPD Provider Logo
- Verifiable Provider Number
- CPD Provider Certificate
- Automatically Listed on The CPD Register
For more information, please see Free CPD Training Provider Approval, CPD Training Providers become CPD Ready!
Guidance on CPD Accreditation
In our Pathway IT Tea Break Training™ Achieve CPD Accreditation for Your Learning Material course, we share insights and practical steps you can take to achieve CPD accreditation for your training material.
The course aims to help you:
- Understand the CPD accreditation process and the CPD Group A.C.C.R.E.D.I.T.E.D Framework.
- Learn how to use existing documentation to create courses.
- Use a simple spreadsheet to assist in estimating CPD credits/hours.
- Understand course prerequisites and accessibility requirements.
- Learn the format Pathway IT Consultants used for its CPD accreditation.
- Learn what to include in the title of your course.
- Understand the importance of grammar and spelling in preparing professional courses and the use of Scribbr to ensure that your documents are professional quality.
Please note that the examples in this course are based on our instructor-led and online courses. They contain modules, tests and coursework.
Who is This Course For?
This course will be valuable for training companies, learning and development teams and anyone with a requirement to achieve CPD accreditation for learning content.
Learning Outcomes
At the end of the course, you should:
- Understand the prerequisite activity of obtaining CPD Approved Provider status before you can submit training material. This involves review and approval of your policies, processes and quality standards.
- Have a good understanding of The CPD Group A.C.C.R.E.D.I.T.E.D Framework for learning material.
- Know how to structure instructor-led and online training courses.
- Be able to use the example spreadsheet as a starting point for estimating the number of hours/credits for your learning material.
- Understand the importance of quality assurance when preparing your courses/learning material.
- Know how to use Scribbr for grammar and spelling.
- Understand how to use existing documentation to prepare your courses.
It’s important to note that this course will not guarantee that you will receive CPD accreditation. The purpose of this training is to share the approach Pathway IT took to obtain approval. We want to help you achieve accreditation for your activities. We’ll look at the format of the courses and share some areas we had to update. This should save you valuable time.
Lessons Learnt
The key things we have learnt are:
- Review the accreditation framework to understand the requirements for approval.
- Include CPD in your course name when you submit it for accreditation.
- Think about your course prerequisites and include them.
- Consider accessibility and how you are going to ensure access to all learners. Think about the different requirements and include them in your accreditation documentation.
- Estimating CPD credits requires a structured approach. We have a spreadsheet that allocates X minutes for each slide and columns to estimate coursework. This spreadsheet template is included in our course.
- The quality of your material is very important, and Scribbr has been invaluable for documentation quality assurance.
The accreditation process is thorough, but we don’t want to make the process sound difficult. Pathway IT worked with The CPD Group and found that they were very professional and extremely helpful.
Is CPD accreditation valuable? Absolutely, it means your learners can trust the quality of your training material.
In addition to our course, we also provide mentoring on CPD accreditation. Please contact us if you have any queries or need support.
Good luck and best wishes with your courses!
Please note that Pathway IT Consultants Ltd selected The CPD Group for accreditation and uses Scribbr to check course documentation. This is our only commercial relationship.
The Pathway IT Tea Break Training™ Achieve CPD Accreditation for Your Learning Material is an online course, and mentoring is available in Milton Keynes or at your premises.
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