Evidence In Motion has a large course catalog with multiple focus areas. If you are a physical therapist or an occupational therapist, you can easily earn all your CEUs for life without ever looking elsewhere. We also have coursework for other healthcare providers and are expanding these options all the time.
The challenge is how to ensure that your needs are being met. One of these is to determine which focus area. That is a topic for another day. This will discuss the style of education.
Let’s define the types of courses first.
Self-paced: There are hundreds of these available in our catalog with topics varying from DN+ Athletes: FDN for Artistic Athletes to Advanced Orthotic Techniques to Nutrition and Pain. You will have access to and need to complete these within 6 months. There are no due dates. There are no faculty or classmates. (Although you always have support by emailing our ticketing system info@eimpt.com, and they can get our academic team to help you if needed.) These are short, inexpensive, and can open doors to new ideas. Typically, the only assignment is a short quiz.
Self-Paced Test Prep Courses: We have board exam test preparation courses for orthopaedics, sports, geriatrics, and pelvic & women’s health. These are aimed at people who want to sit for the exams through the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties. You will have access to this course for 1 year and have the support of the course faculty while enrolled in this. Similarly, there are no due dates or interactions with other people. There are hundreds of questions to help you prepare for the day of the board exam. Depending on your knowledge and experience, you may want to enroll in one of our residencies or certifications to support you even more when preparing to sit for these exams.
Online, faculty-led courses: These courses are still completely online. No travel needed. Most courses are completely asynchronous meaning you don’t have specific times to be online. These vary in length from 2 weeks to 2 months. There are specific start and end dates. They have due dates within that time. You will interact with a faculty member and often with your classmates. These tend to be a bit more reflective than the self-paced courses. In addition to quizzes, there will be different styles of assignments including discussion boards, video assignments, and interactive cases studies. These are going to focus much more on deeper clinical reasoning and application of that clinical reasoning.
Hybrid labs: These courses are our in-person courses. You will travel to the location of the course and sit in a room with other people enrolled in the course and an instructor who will lecture and/or teach psychomotor skills – the traditional CEU course. All our coursework has an online component, which is why it is called hybrid. The online portion is usually a few hours of pre-recorded lectures and a quiz after the course. The lectures will set you up with any information you need to know prior to attending the in-person component. You will get access to these 30 days before attending the course.
Online, virtual labs: Initially born during the ill-fated year of 2020, we have continued to update and modify these. Not everyone can or wants to travel for CEUs. These match our hybrid weekend intensive lab courses, but the lectures and demonstrations are online. You will turn in recordings of you performing the techniques and will receive feedback from an instructor, like if you were in person. There is usually a final quiz. Some of these also have a synchronous session where the instructor and all your classmates meet in a video chat for a more interactive experience.
Now to think about which type of course you should take.
For me, the first step in this decision is very personal. You should think about how busy your life is currently and what stage of life you are in. If the thought of traveling makes your stomach churn with stress, you should choose our online courses. If the thought of weekly due dates freaks you out or you have enough people interactions during the day and don’t want any more, then you should choose self-paced courses only.
I think from here there are a few other factors to consider. One of these is what stage are you in for your career. If you are a new graduate or early career professional, then there is a ton of benefit from attending classes in person or doing the online faculty-led courses. These provide interactions with reflection which is what drives improvements in clinical reasoning. Some of you may feel burnt out from having been in college and graduate school for so long. Those feelings are absolutely valid and should be listened to. But don’t let too long pass without taking interactive classes. These will be different than your entry-level program because you will be reflecting on your patients. These will be different because you will be with a group of people with diverse experiences who can push you to reflect on why you make the choices you do with your patients.
If you have been working a while and have taken many clinical reasoning and psychomotor classes, it may make sense to add to your knowledge from the self-paced classes. These tend to have a very specific topic and targeted information. You can synthesize this into what you already know. But if you have been working a while and have not kept up on the current research (which is so easy to fall behind on) or you haven’t recently practiced hands-on techniques with someone who has strong psychomotor skills, you probably want to think about taking a faculty-led online or hybrid lab class to really brush up on and expand your knowledge base.
There are lots of other reasons to choose one style of education over another such as the amount of money your facility offers each year for continuing education. The choice is deeply personal. One last thing to consider, though, is whether you are at a stage where you want one course on a topic or a deeper, longitudinal dive into a topic. Evidence In Motion can help either way. This has mostly been about our one-time coursework. Many of these courses are part of our ongoing certifications and can even be applied to these certifications if you start them soon after the course*. So, if you take one course and realize you are thirsty for more, take a moment to consider our certifications.
No matter what you choose, know that your patients are lucky that you are a person who wants to broaden their education and be a life-long learner. That’s why we do what we do, because we know that our patients deserve the best possible care. Thank you for thinking of Evidence In Motion to help you on that journey.
Kristin Smith, PT, DPT, DSc, OCS, FAAOMPT, MAT
*Due to accreditation requirements, residency requires all coursework to be taken during the program and cannot be transferred in.
