Op-ed: Reimagining Continuing Education

The formal method of verifying the currency of licensed architects through continuing education requirements has been in place in most provincial associations since the turn of the millennium. The introduction of these requirements parallels the revision of educational requirements for licensure, from professionally focussed five-year undergraduate university programs to diverse graduate programs. The task of determining what is germane to professional competence is a notable regulatory challenge, but the fact that all our professional associations have resorted to fines—in excess of registration fees—to leverage compliance with continuing education requirements suggests that something is amiss, and worthy of rigorous and objective review.

The original intent of continuing education as a non-profit, low-cost-to-architects way to keep practitioners up to date is not immediately obvious. The AIBC states the purpose of required continuing education as “a response to the public’s increasing expectation that architects remain current with contemporary technology, business practices, methods, and materials.” But in other cases, there has been noticeable mission-creep. The OAA describes the intent of continuing education as part of the organization’s “dedication to promoting and increasing the knowledge, skill, and proficiency of its members, and administering the Architects Act to serve and protect the public interest.” One large association thus defines their mission as keeping members up to date. The other offers a broader and more open-ended mission statement that extends well beyond the issue of currency. This reflects two quite different paths.

Regulating educational requirements is a tough challenge, certainly, for any organization. “The broader the range of issues to be accommodated, the greater the difficulty to regulate” is a familiar axiom. In our profession, regulating education should be premised on the fact that architects process information and come to understand their craft in unique ways. Visual literacy, for instance, is core to an architect’s formal education and professional skill set. The accreditation process for evaluating architecture university programs in Canada, as one example, requires an exhibition of ideas and concepts as a principal component. This is how we communicate, learn, and grow as architects. Yet, ironically, attendance at such an exhibition would be ruled invalid as counting towards provincial continuing education requirements, because its inherent value cannot be readily quantified.

A sizable amount of regulation focusing on professional development is also premised on the notion that one can somehow quantify reading, and accurately corroborate the time taken to research a topic, author a book, or publish an article. In contrast, travel—which for most architects is acknowledged as an important way of coming to understand architecture—is only deemed valid by regulators if it can be corroborated by a tour guide receipt. A mode of regulation that would more accurately reflect lived experience would not be driven by administrative expediency, and would assign value beyond that which can be easily quantified.

Activities cited in the “unstructured learning” category—aside from association meetings and committee work—are, on the whole, largely impossible to regulate with specificity, and in most cases, fail to credibly validate either currency or knowledge. Elimination of these activities would be a positive first step, and serve to focus attention on legitimate profession-specific requirements. A compelling argument can be made that compliance with unstructured continuing education requirements achieves nothing but increased workloads for regulators, ill will of individual members, and no credible validation of whether the individual in question is up-to-date or not.

Structured professional development, on the other hand, can and should be monitored in a comprehensive and straightforward manner. The profession of architecture, while complex and ubiquitous in comparison to other professions, is not so complicated when it comes down to what we actually do. All North American schools of architecture seeking accreditation, for instance, are presently required to meet student and program performance criteria that are specific, quantifiable, and accepted by 185 post-secondary institutions with widely differing missions and geographic settings. Consensus on this kind of complex and diverse subject matter has thus proven to be possible. The professionally specific Internship Architecture Program (IAP) provides another example of how the scope of professional activity can be defined in 15 rationally weighted categories that all associations agree on. The referencing of continuing education activity to any of these 15 categories could serve to ameliorate concerns of whether subject matter is profession-specific.

The question arises of whether verifying compliance with continuing education requirements is fair to all associations. Smaller provincial associations with limited resources, in particular, are not well positioned to credibly monitor professional development activity, or to deal with clarification and interpretation of regulations. Most associations rely entirely on computerized transcripts to record and tally up activity hours in each category, and restrict entries beyond the deadline of each cycle. The few unfortunate individuals targeted for audit rely on local interpretation, which can vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The concept of a national organization such as the RAIC as a central repository for course material and records has obvious merit. The RAIC already offers mostly online courses. Professionally qualified staff could efficiently manage queries on regulatory requirements. Local jurisdictions could then, as most already do, focus on continuing education related to regional issues, such as changes to legislation, building codes, construction documents, and bidding and contract negotiation.

Updating continuing education requirements first requires acknowledgement that the existing system appears to be falling short of its intended mission. A quarter century of experience should provide hard evidence that we are failing to reach the desired results. The autonomy of provincial associations should be prepared to yield to a greater need for consistency, fairness, and objectivity across jurisdictional boundaries. Well-crafted and intelligent regulation can—and should—eliminate any question of competence and currency from public concern.

Robert Ian Macdonald, FRAIC, is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Manitoba.

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