Right Here, Right Now.

• Author: SPANIEL, BILL
• Position: Continuing professional education

//: ONLINE CLASSES OFFER FLEXIBILITY AND CONVENIENCE

thanks to technology, you can earn continuing professional education credits whenever you want them and wherever you are whether it's in your office, at your home, or on a business trip to Singapore. You don't have to schedule a hotel seminar several weeks in advance or wait for days for self-study materials to arrive in the mail. All you need is a computer with an Internet connection, and with the click of a mouse, you can accumulate credits.

Several vendors market Internet-based courses as well as computer-based self-study programs that you can download through the Web and review while offline. Bisk Education at http://www.cpeasy.com, for example, offers more than 300 self-study courses that are approved by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy under its Quality Assurance Service. Positive Systems' PASS program (http://www.passonline.com) has scores of online and download-able CPE courses. At the end of each class, the student takes a competency exam that automatically grade itself. Through its InfoBytes program, the AICPA (http://www.aicpa.org/temp/infobytes.htm) offers about 1,000 hours of CPE training in one to two-hour segments that you download over the Internet.

The California CPA Education Foundation uses the Internet to provide more than 100 CPE alternatives. Many of the courses are offered through its partnerships with eMind.com, Online Learning.net and the University of Phoenix, which offer online CPE courses or provide online instruction in accounting and other fields for non-CPE credit. The Foundation itself currently administers two online self-study courses and three online instructor-led classes. Each of the three instructor-led online courses is limited to a maximum of 25 students to keep them manageable for both the students and instructors. (See sidebar, Page 28.)

Kurtis Docken, director of program development, says the Foundation hopes to increase its online offerings in the future. "CPAs have busy schedules," he says. "They often can't take the time to travel to a seminar to earn their CPE credits. Online instruction offers members flexibility. They can take an online course while at home or at work and at any hour of the day or night. Online education is designed to meet the student's schedule."

Education Foundation President David Cieslak agrees that online education can be a godsend to busy CPAs. "It makes highly technical training available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it is location independent so you can train in or out of state."

Cieslak himself has taken the Foundation's online self-study professional ethics review course and was quite pleased with the result. "It was convenient and dead-on-the-money in terms of training. I definitely didn't need to meet with an instructor or other students."

DIFFERENT ONLINE TECHNIQUES

Self-study programs that use the Internet, computer disks or CD-ROM for information transmission are basically the same as the mail-ordered self-study programs of the past. Sure, today's students can view colorful graphics, obtain streaming video or audio, and access various Internet resources, but they are essentially studying solo without interaction from other students or instructors.

Instructor-led online courses, however, provide an electronic-classroom experience. How such instruction is conducted varies according to the...