Opticians Association of Canada (OAC)
How the OAC Tripled Continuing Education Completion Among Canadian Opticians
The Opticians Association of Canada used Ventla to shift from annual in-person education events to monthly virtual learning — and saw members receive three times more education than before.
The annual conference had served its purpose for 30 years. Then everything changed — and it turned out that more frequent, more accessible learning worked better for members anyway. When the Opticians Association of Canada needed to replace its annual in-person education event, they built a monthly virtual learning programme on Ventla that delivered three times more continuing education to members — and levelled the participation gap between generations.
The situation
For healthcare professionals in Canada, continuing education isn't optional. Opticians must expand their knowledge each year to maintain their licensure — the same requirement that applies to physicians, pharmacists, and other regulated healthcare practitioners. Since 1990, the Opticians Association of Canada (OAC) has been the body responsible for delivering that education to licensed opticians across the country.
For most of those 30+ years, the mechanism was straightforward: an annual conference where members gathered to complete their education requirements, stay current on industry developments, and connect with peers. The model worked — until 2020, when gathering wasn't an option.
But the OAC's experience with Ventla turned out to be about more than finding a pandemic workaround. It became an experiment in whether a different delivery model might actually serve members better than the one they'd been using for three decades.
What they needed
The OAC needed a platform that would:
- Deliver accredited continuing education virtually, in a way that members across different provinces and demographics could access easily
- Support both live virtual sessions and on-demand learning, so members weren't constrained by a fixed schedule
- Track completion accurately — education compliance is a regulatory requirement, so reporting had to be reliable
- Be simple enough for members across a wide age range (including those less comfortable with technology) to use without support
- Scale to monthly cadence rather than an annual event, without proportionally scaling the administrative burden
How they used Ventla
The OAC shifted from a single annual event to a monthly virtual meeting series, using Ventla as both the delivery platform and the reporting system. Pre-recorded presentations were made available within the app, giving members the flexibility to complete learning on their own schedule rather than attending at a fixed time.
Administrators could track participation and completion through Ventla's reporting system, giving them the data they needed to verify members' education compliance — a genuine operational requirement for a licensed professional body.
The platform's accessibility proved to be one of its most important characteristics. At least three members over the age of 80 were successfully using the app independently. For an association whose membership spans multiple generations, the fact that the platform didn't create a digital divide was operationally significant.
What happened
The numbers shifted substantially. Members were receiving three times more continuing education through the monthly virtual programme than they had through the annual conference format. The increased frequency, combined with on-demand access, meant that members could fit education into their schedules rather than reorganizing their schedules around a single annual event.
Participation patterns changed in an unexpected way. Younger opticians — those roughly 40 and under — had historically been underrepresented in continuing education completion. With the virtual, on-demand format, their participation increased significantly. The flexibility of digital delivery removed the barriers that had previously led to lower engagement among the younger cohort.
The age gap in participation, which had been a persistent challenge for the OAC, began to level off. Both older and younger members were now engaging at comparable rates.
What this means for similar organizations
The OAC's story is directly relevant to any professional association, membership body, or regulatory organization responsible for delivering continuing professional development. The structural insight is worth sitting with: an annual gathering, however well-run, limits access by definition. A monthly virtual programme removes the most common barriers to participation — geography, schedule, cost — and reaches members who would otherwise miss out.
For associations running CPD or licensing requirements, the combination of on-demand content and reliable completion tracking addresses both the member experience problem (flexibility) and the administrative problem (accurate reporting). Both are often underserved by traditional conference-based models.
The participation shift among younger members is also worth noting. If your association's education engagement skews older, it may be a delivery model problem as much as an interest problem.
Industry: Healthcare / Professional Association · Event type: Continuing Education Programme · Attendees: Licensed opticians across Canada · Region: Canada
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