Continuing Professional Education: Moving into the 80's. Conference Proceedings (Calgary, Alberta, October 22-24, 1980).

Overview & Synopsis

This publication contains addresses on continuing professional education given at a conference at the University of Calgary (Canada) in October, 1980. Themes of the conference speakers included the need for continuing professional education and the content and delivery of such education. In an opening address, J. Roby Kidd discussed the meaning of "professional" and predicted the trends in continuing professional education in the 1980s. Following this address, Alan B. Knox reported on a study of university-based continuing professional education efforts in five fields--medicine, pharmacy, social work, education, and law. He noted that organizational aspects of each of these educational efforts can be useful for other professions' efforts in continuing education. The pros and cons of making continuing professional education mandatory then were debated by Floyd Pennington, who concluded that the benefits of mandatory CPE cannot be documented. In the next address, H. K. Baskett and Christopher W. Day proposed that reliance on program planning notions and ideas about andragogy as currently held result in education inconsistent with the true needs and learning behaviors of professionals, and that the inconsistencies in current theories should be examined to improve continuing professional education. Following a panel discussion on cooperation and competetion in the delivery of continuing professional education, J. Roby Kidd ended the conference with a summary of the recurrent remarks and themes heard during the meeting. (Descriptions of nine workshops held at the conference are included in the report.) (KC)