Online Course Submission Form

 
Review Our Program

A good place to start is to review our current online offerings.

• You can view the course listings: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlineoverview.html
• By alphabetical order: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlinealpha.html
• By author’s name: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlineauthor.html
• By subject: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlinesubject.html
• Please click on some courses and see how they are presented.
  • Examples are:
    Termination: http://www.zurinstitute.com/termination4_course.html
    Supervision: http://www.zurinstitute.com/clinicalsupervisioncourse.html
• Next, please check our online packages: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlinepkgs.html

 
CE Information

We have been offering continuing education to therapists for about 20 years. We are an APA approved sponsor and are also approved by ASWB, NBCC, BBS-CA, CRC, NAADAC and CA-BRN. The Zur Institute CE page is at: http://www.zurinstitute.com/CEcredits.html.

 
The Future Of Online CE

These web-based online courses often rely exclusively on hotlinks to online articles in html and pdf and/or include MP3, video or PPT files. Online CE is the way of the future. This is how the approximately 600,000 psychotherapists in the US will get their CE credits in the coming years. For example, in California about 35,000 MFTs and LCSWs can take their entire 36 CE credits online in each renewal cycle. Psychologists in California, about 12,000 of them, can earn up to 27 CE credits online in each renewal cycle. Many other psychologists, social workers and counselors around the country can take their CE credits online. In other words, instead of sending therapists a book, reader or audiotape via snail mail, they get several hotlinks online to already existing (or new) articles on the web. The entire course material is on the web. Therapists can take the course any time and any place, as long as they have access to a computer and the Internet. We are also approved to provide CE credits for Nurses, Psych. Techs. & LVNs. This is another huge market.

 
Content Of This Page

Please keep the content and the links included in this document private as they are intended only for you for use in our communication.

 
Developing A Course For ZI Will:

• Disseminate your ideas.
• Provide you with a residual/passive income, paid quarterly, for many years to come.
• Provide an enduring benefit for a small one-time investment on your part.
• Attract, if applicable, more traffic to your website and increase sales of your book/s or other products. It may also increase your referral base.

 
Financial Arrangement

• You will be paid a certain % of all sales after the initial investment is paid off.
• Generally, the first 10 to 15 courses sold will cover the expenses of putting the course on the web. After these first courses are sold you will receive the agreed upon % of the sales, quarterly, as long as the course is selling.
• Some courses are purchased as part of a package for a reduced price or for a discount, and you will receive your percentage of these packages accordingly.
• Obviously, there is no guarantee of how many courses will be sold and how much money you will make.
• We will market your course via social media, at least one e-blast and display it clearly alongside all our other courses on the website. Your course will be searchable by subject, keywords, title and by your (author) name.
• We strongly recommend that you participate in our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn campaigns if you have a presence there. Zur Institute customers appreciate interaction with authors, and this can help increase sales for your course.
• We also recommend that you promote your own course via email to colleagues, posting the link and description on your website, and/or adding a line to your email signature linking to the course.
• You will receive quarterly reports of your royalties that include the number of courses sold individually and the number of courses sold as part of a package. These reports arrive electronically and your royalties (if any) will be delivered via direct deposit. If you wish to receive a check instead, please let us know. Quarterly reports and payments are dispersed within thirty (30) days of the end of the quarter (end of April, July, October, January).
• If some permissions to use articles must be paid to the publishers or there are unusual expenses, these extra payments will be made by ZI. You will be notified about these extra charges, and they will be added to the initial setup fee.

 
Contract

Once we are in agreement on a course title and content, we have seen a sample of the materials for the course, and you have an understanding of the process, we will email you a contract.

 
The Online Course Process Is Simple

Step 1: Therapists sign up (register) and pay online.

Step 2: They get directions to their profile.

Step 3: They click on “course materials” and then click on links to html, pdf, audio, video or PowerPoint files. As new forms of materials develop, we will offer those as well. Customers have permission to download or save course materials to their personal computers for future reference.

Step 4: They take the post-test online and submit it online anytime they want.

Step 5: They complete the course evaluation online.

Step 6: They get their test results instantaneously online.

Step 7: They obtain an online printable CE certificate of completion.

 
Sample Of An Entire Course

• Here is what a therapist reads BEFORE signing up: http://www.zurinstitute.com/adhdcourse.html.
• You can view the publicly available descriptions of other courses here: http://www.zurinstitute.com/homeonlineoverview.html.
• We will set up an individual account and profile under your name and email with a couple of courses so you can see how our system works. We will send you instructions on how to access these sample courses. You may complete the post-test and receive CE credits for these sample courses if you wish to do so.

 
To Start We Need The Following From You:

• Course title.
• Potential or sample materials: Titles and links to articles, videos, audios and PowerPoints that are already online or as an attachment for materials that are not yet online.

 
Ultimately, you will be sent a Master Submission Document (SubDoc) that you can use as a guideline for submitting all information and material needed for the course. This makes the process easier for you and for our staff.

1. One paragraph of general description. (The course description should clearly describe any commercial support for the CE program, presentation, or instructor and any other relationship that could be reasonably construed as a conflict of interest.)
2. One paragraph describing the articles.
3. 4-6 Course Objectives.
4. Syllabus (table of contents).
5. Course reading: Titles and links to articles that are already online or texts, via email attachment, for articles that are not yet online.
6. True/False Posttest questions (the number of posttest questions is determined by the number of CE credits, which is determined by the length of the text). Mark each question with T or F. Generally, the posttest questions should be more conceptual and general, not too specific like questions about statistics. Questions about statistics, if any, should be kept to less than 10% of the total number of questions.
7. Summary of all the articles included in the course. For each article we need:
• The word count.
• The copyright holder who gave us permission to use a link or post.
• Total of all words in all articles.
8. Short bio and photo (we can use photos that are already online).

 
We Will Also Need:

1. Permissions to post articles online on our website from the holder of the copyright.
2. A marketing E-Blast that summarizes the course content. This is psycho-educational marketing or what we call a Clinical Update. This is what we send out to all the therapists on our mailing list to advertise the course. For samples of past Clinical Updates, click here.

 
Course Material

The reading material you suggest for the course:
• Should be written in academic style at the postgraduate level.
• Should be of a high standard from the point of view of psychology.
• Should respect cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status.
• Must be presented in APA style. Articles must be current and preferably the references should be from peer review journals.
   
The course material may include:
• Existing online articles, audios, videos or power point presentations (PPT): This can be any article, video, audio file or power point presentation (slide presentation) already posted on the web. You need not be the author. Whether you authored the materials or not, we need to get permission from the holder of the copyright to post them on our website. When the time comes, you or we will send the emails requesting permission to post any materials.
• Note: You can find a wealth of information on http://www.nih.gov, http://www.nimh.nih.gov and other .gov web pages. The advantage of these sites is that we can use them without asking for permissions as they are considered “Open Source” or “Public Domain.” Generally, a course should not include more than one such “Open Source” article.
• Your own articles, book chapters, audio files, PPTs, or videos: If you have a book, articles, chapters, videos, audio files or PPTs which are not online but which you would like to see on the course reading list, we can easily put them online so they can be accessed through the course hotlinks. (Of course, if we put your material online, you can also use them for any other purpose that you may have.) If the material was published somewhere or you are not the holder of the copyright, as an author, it should be relatively easy to get permission to put them online for the limited purpose of this course.
• Writing new text: If you choose to write new text or modify an old article for the course, send it to us as an email attachment in Word, and we will put it on our website. We do not do copy editing, proofreading, formatting of bibliography to APA style, etc. It is your responsibility to provide us with a well-written and well-formatted article. In some cases we may recommend that you use a professional editor (we use them all the time) to clean up the manuscript. If you send us your audio, video, or PPT, make sure it is geared towards a professional audience.
• If you wish to write an overview, “Read me first” piece, definitions or introduction, it will be very simple to put online and ask participants to click on this hotlink first. This piece can also include definitions, descriptions of the online articles, references to additional online or other (not online) sources, etc. (Examples: http://www.zurinstitute.com/online/telehealthbarnett.html and http://www.zurinstitute.com/online/riskintro.html)
• If you wish to write a summary or guidelines, you can do that also. Example: http://www.zurinstitute.com/recordkeepingguidelines.html.
• Each course should include an Online Resource as the last article of the course. The list should include different sections and for each resource, give title/name and URL. Examples: http://www.zurinstitute.com/telehealthresources.html and http://www.zurinstitute.com/recordkeepingguidelines.html.

 
Permissions

If you do not own the copyrights for the articles, we need to get permission from the holder of the copyright to post them on our website.

• If you own the copyrights, that makes life very simple.
• If you are the author, the publisher is likely to give you permission to post the article online so that it can be included in the course.
• Sometimes it takes some detective work to find out who owns the copyrights. We send a few emails until we get the right person who, hopefully, gives us permission.
• If you were assigned a mentor, the mentor will be ultimately responsible to submit the course material to the Zur Institute. The mentor will guide you in the process, make the final decision regarding the texts, and send the requests for permission to post the articles of your choice on our website.

 
Number Of CE Credits

• The length of the text in the course determines the number of CE credits. When you show us the articles and give us the total # of words, we will tell you the # of CE credits.
• The number of CE credits determines how many posttest questions and the price of the course.
• Most courses are between one and six CE credits.

 
Marketing

• Zur Institute is an APA approved sponsor, and APA will post all the courses online. We also have specific CE sponsorship for some states such as for BBS in CA.
• We send periodic emails announcing our courses to the many thousands of therapists on my private e-list.
• We hope that you will also promote your online course through your own e-network, newsletters and any other connections.
• We sometimes advertise in professional journals.
• We offer special membership benefit discounts to professional organizations.
• You can increase sales for your courses by providing a web banner on your website linking to your course or your author’s page.
• Please also announce the course to your colleagues, friends and family, sending them a link to the public course landing page. You can advertise your course/s in your email signature, if appropriate.

 
The Next Step

• If you were already assigned a mentor, please contact him or her directly.
• If you have questions, feel free to write us at info@zurinstitute.com.