About the Centre

The Continuing & Professional Education Centre (CPEC) was formed in March 2019 as The Global Campus' response to establishing a dedicated team that is specifically tasked with managing and supporting the Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) work of the Campus. The Centre is made up of a team of five, including the Director, an Administrative Assistant, a Programme Manager (Special Projects) and two Programme Officers - one focuses on Continuing Education and the other on Professional Education. For more details about the team, click here.

What is CPE?

Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) is located within a lifelong learning and workforce development framework and consists of a range of credit and non-credit programmes. Included among the non-credit programmes are professional development short courses, workforce development programmes, personal enrichment programmes, and customized workforce solutions. CPE as defined within The UWI Global Campus’ CPE policy has two distinct, although in some regards overlapping, areas of focus: continuing education and continuing professional education.

Continuing Education (CE) focuses on pre-university basic and vocational education; is designed for adults with no higher education qualifications; caters for university certified individuals who are seeking to enhance their knowledge in a particular area and fulfils workforce development needs.

Professional Education (PE) constitutes a systematized and codified set of activities that are directly related to the continuing professional development of members of a community of practice. Typical of this would be professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers. Unlike some of the target groups in Continuing Education, these professionals are usually highly qualified and in most cases have an undergraduate and/or a graduate degree. Programming for these individuals is usually in the form of seminars, workshops, and short workforce development courses in which they earn CEUs as approved by their professional associations.

What are CEUs?

Continuing Education Units (CEUs) are an international system of measuring, recognising, and recording individuals’ participation in non-credit continuing educational programmes. It is designed to give recognition to individuals continuing their education, wishing to keep up-to-date in their chosen fields, or entering a career field at a very basic level. The international standard as advocated by the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education and Training (ACCET) to measure continuing education activities is 1 CEU represents 10 contact or instructional hours of learner engagement in a learning activity leading to specified learning outcome(s). Persons may also be awarded part CEUs for continuing education learning activities less than 10 hours; for example, an individual who participates in five hours of continuing education learning activities would be awarded 0.5 CEUs (see table 1 below). Similarly, for one hour the individual would be awarded 0.1 CEUs. However, CEUs are usually not awarded for learning activities of less than one hour. The engagement time may be calculated irrespective of learning mode or type of activity