Conducting a Cooperative Offering

What Is a Cooperative Offering?

If an ASHA Approved Continuing Education (CE) Provider joins with an organization or entity that is not an ASHA Approved CE Provider to plan, conduct, deliver, and evaluate a continuing education course for ASHA continuing education units (CEUs), then the course is considered a cooperative CE course.

The ASHA Continuing Education Board (CEB) considers a course a cooperative offering if another party or entity is not part of the organization approved as the ASHA Approved CE Provider, as detailed in the application to become an ASHA Approved CE Provider.

When two or more ASHA Approved CE Providers team up to jointly plan, conduct, deliver, and evaluate a course, this relationship is referred to as a joint providership. One of the ASHA Approved CE Providers should take responsibility for the registration and reporting of the course to ASHA. There is no fee due to ASHA when two or more ASHA Approved CE Providers offer a course.

Why Conduct a Cooperative CE Offering?

Audiologists and speech-language pathologists look for the ASHA CE Provider Brand Block [PDF] when seeking continuing education programs to meet their needs. The ASHA CE Provider Brand Block indicates that the program meets high standards and offers ASHA CEUs that are applicable toward Certificates of Clinical Competence (CCC) Maintenance, licensure renewal, career advancement, and the ASHA Award for Continuing Education (ACE). Because your organization's course will be registered on the ASHA CE Registry, it will be listed on ASHA's website through ASHA CEFind, a searchable database that lists only those CE courses that are being offered by ASHA Approved CE Providers. ASHA CEFind is updated nightly and provides individuals with access to tens of thousands of course offerings registered annually with the ASHA CE Registry.

Become familiar with ASHA Approved CE Provider Standards.

The cooperative CE offering process gives you an inside view of the procedures that ASHA Approved CE Providers follow when planning, implementing, and evaluating their CE courses. After conducting a cooperative CE offering, you can make a more informed decision about pursuing ASHA Approved CE Provider status.

Note: The cooperative CE offering process was established to (a) expose potential ASHA CE Provider applicants to ASHA CEB policies, procedures, and guidelines and (b) enable parties who seldom present courses to audiologists and speech-language pathologists to offer ASHA CEUs. Organizations that regularly offer continuing education activities that relate to the practice or science of audiology or speech-language pathology and that wish to offer ASHA CEUs for those courses should apply for ASHA Approved CE Provider status.

For more information go to how to develop a cooperative offering.