Thoughts on Medbridge

Recently, Medbridge ran a sale on their subscription price in honor of their birthday. I decided that I would sign up since it was a little over half-price off (around $200). I wanted to share my thoughts on the site now that I have had the chance to take several different CEU courses. 

1. Ease of navigation- I love the layout of the website. I can bookmark courses that sound interesting and go to this list whenever I'm ready to start a new course. I can also use my dashboard to view classes that I'm currently taking, review course videos from ones I've finished, and download certificates. 

2. Speakers- Medbridge does a very good job of finding clinicians who have tons of experience in their specific topic. They focus on telling you what has worked in their practices, what current research says, and often include video models of strategies with real clients. I love being able to see these video samples because most of the free courses I've taken often don't have enough time to include these or only show samples without much explanation. The fluency assessment course in particular was very helpful to me as I've recently had to do my first true fluency assessment since taking my fluency course back in graduate school. I went into it feeling much more confident because of how much practice with speech samples was embedded into that particular course. 

3. Course design- I have mostly focused on taking multi-hour course series so far since enrolling. The longest was a 7 hour course on dysphagia and the shortest so far was a 3 hour series on social language. I can pause the courses at any point and return to them without consequence. Every course that I've taken has video segments lasting as little as 10 minutes and as long as 40 minutes before a 3-4 question quiz. The quizzes add up at the end to give you an overall course score. I like the way it is broken up into short videos and quizzes rather than one huge lecture and huge quiz. It makes me feel more successful, especially since I typically do better with on site workshops. 

Overall, I can say that I'm glad that I decided to sign up for this program as the courses are all very well designed and executed. I feel like I've learned so much in the brief time that I've been a member and it is definitely improving my clinical skills. The biggest downside to me is that it is heavily focused on the medical side of speech. This is what I wanted the subscription for, but I think SpeechPathology.com does a better job of being well-rounded. They are clearly making an effort to include topics such as fluency and social language skills. I also think that the price is hard to pay when they don't have a sale going on. I would not pay $425 for a subscription. It's just too expensive in comparison to $99. (This is especially true when you already have your 30 CEUs completed.)