As a speech language pathologist, you are required to maintain your level of continued education units (CEUs) every year to keep your professional licensing effective.
Attending conferences and events can provide great networking opportunities. But, the Internet provides many online speech pathology continuing education courses that make it far more convenient.
How Many CEUs for Speech Therapists?
According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), New York licensing requires that you maintain a minimum of 30 hours continuing education/ competence hours per 3-year registration renewal cycle.
What this equates to is 3.0 CEUs over 3 years, with 0.1 CEU equal to one competence/ certification hour. Since many continuing education courses are 0.1 CEUs, this equals roughly 10 hours per year. You also need at least 20 hours on professional subjects and can then have 10 hours on related subjects.
ASHA provides more information over here and here and here. Find a range of New York specific information here and here.
Speech Pathology Continuing Education Courses Online
If online courses are ASHA approved it means they have been peer reviewed by experts to ensure the subject matter is appropriate for professional development.
Paid Courses
Search ASHA for various CEU courses here.
Speech Pathology.com provides over 300 courses you can access on a $99 annual membership. All the courses are conveniently located online, which gives you the ability to keep up your training hours when you have time. The courses include webinars, videos, text based, and audios from a collection of experts and health organizations. For example, Kathleen Howland, PhD in Neuroscience, provides a course called “A Neuroscience Primer for Speech-Language Pathologists,” which helps you understand the neural and physiological side of cognition, speech and language skills. This is just one example of what’s available and each course has the CEUs/ Hours listed. Most courses are worth 0.1 – 0.15 CEU credits.
Speech Therapy PD.com also offers an annual subscription model starting at $89 per year for 1 – 3 hour courses. There are approximately 100 courses available for speech pathologists at that cost, or for $189 you can access all the courses plus live in-person events and an online community.
Free Courses
Mayer-Johnson provides a range of free pre recorded video workshops that are AHSA CEU approved. These do seem to be directed more toward their Boardmaker Software but you may find a few useful videos. Before taking one of the courses, check the right hand column to ensure it does provide CEUs, many of them don’t.
If you’re working with patients that have aphasia, Lingraphica offer 3 ways to gain CEUs:
- Do their 3 learning assessment reports worth 0.25 CEU credits and receive a certificate of participation.
- Supervise a free device trial with a client – gain 0.8 – 24 CEU credits.
- Attend one of their live webinars – gain 0.1 CEU credits.
Super Duper Inc.com has free prerecorded courses for speech pathologists. For example, “Using Language Webs and Altered Auditory Input to Improve Language Processing and Comprehension,” worth 0.1 CEUs. You just have to sign up for a free account to get started.