The State of Minnesota has begun to enforce a rule about online continuing education courses.
The rule states:
Pursuant to Minnesota Statute Chapter 45, Section 45.306, Subd. 2:
An interactive Internet continuing education course must:(3) include technology to guarantee seat time; (* See clarification below.)
*45.306 Subd2. (3)While seat time is a definite requirement and the provider must include technology to guarantee it, this does not mean that to accomplish it, a licensee should be sitting in front of a computer waiting for X number of hours to pass. The course itself must contain the right amount of interactive instruction content to take the same X number of hours, or more, as requested by the provider. If a provider is asking for 2 hours of credit, that course must take a licensee 2 hours, or more, of interactive learning to complete. This also means that the course must have the technology to time out (automatically log out) if a licensee leaves the computer inactive for more than ten minutes so that they cannot log in and then walk away from the computer for the 2 hours and receive credit.
Rates of reading include:
reading for memorization (fewer than 100 words per minute [wpm]);
reading for learning (100–200 wpm);
reading for comprehension (200–400 wpm); and
skimming (400–700 wpm).
Reading for comprehension is the essence of the daily reading of most people.
Skimming is for superficially processing large quantities of text at a low level
of comprehension (below 50%).
Our courses are set to reading for comprehension at 240 wpm.
This course has been designed to follow a time allocated outline. Each page is timed using the reading for comprehension reading rate. The link to move to the next page will display after a preset time has passed. You will be unable to move forward until that link is displayed.
To explain this a little further, once the licensee starts a lesson from the Lesson Menu, the first page of content will NOT have the link display until a preset time has gone by. For example, the first page may contain wording that will take an average person 10 seconds to read. The link will not display until 10 seconds have gone by. Once the link becomes available, the licensee may move to the next page of content. If they haven't finished reading or don't understand the material, they may stay on the page until they are ready to move on. When the next page loads, it may take 30 seconds to read the material and the link will not appear for 30 seconds. Here is an example:
If you need to see the example again, just click the link.