About this site

The short version

I work in clinical dentistry in Australia. Like every registered practitioner, I have a CPD quota to meet: in my case, 60 hours every three years under the Dental Board of Australia. A few years into practice I noticed something odd: I’d pay a few hundred dollars for a conference day, then stumble across a webinar on the exact same topic, run by the same calibre of presenter, completely free on a manufacturer’s education portal.

The free stuff was real. Straumann runs live surgical broadcasts. The big materials companies — 3M (now Solventum), GC, VOCO, Ivoclar — fund hour-long lectures by respected clinicians because it markets their products to exactly the right audience. Platforms like CDEWorld and Viva Learning publish hundreds of certificated CE courses that cost nothing beyond a free account. The problem was never quality or quantity. The problem was that all of it lived on seventeen different websites, each with its own login, its own clunky search, and no way to see the whole landscape at once.

So I started keeping a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet outgrew itself. This site is that spreadsheet, cleaned up and made searchable: currently over 2,000 courses from 70 providers, each one checked by hand, tagged by specialty, with the CPD hours and certificate status recorded.

Who writes this

I’m Dr Sam Jones — a practising dentist in Australia. The story above is mine: the CPD quota, the preference for learning that’s actually good, and no appetite for paying hundreds of dollars for hours that excellent providers give away free.

Every guide on this site is written by me, drawing on the same regulator documents you’d check yourself (linked or named in each guide) and on the practical experience of actually meeting these requirements as a clinician. I curate the course list personally, the site’s link checker verifies course availability automatically, and when something is outside my direct experience — another country’s rules, for instance — I say so and point you to the source. Corrections are always welcome via the contact page.

What “free” means here

Every course listed is free at the point of access. Most require you to create an account with the provider — that’s their trade: your email address in exchange for the education. I think that’s a fair deal, but it’s worth being upfront about. A course only gets a “certificate” tick if the provider issues a completion certificate you can file in your CPD portfolio, usually after a short quiz.

One honest caveat about manufacturer education: it’s sponsored content. A VOCO lecture on composites will feature VOCO composites. In my experience the clinical teaching is usually sound regardless — the presenters are practising clinicians and academics with reputations to protect — but you should watch it with the same critical eye you’d bring to any sponsored lecture at a conference. The science is the science; the product recommendations are marketing.

Editorial independence and funding

I don’t host the courses and ordinary providers do not pay to be included or ranked. The site is funded through display advertising and may carry clearly labelled sponsorship or affiliate placements. Paid placement is kept separate from ordinary search results and editorial picks. The full rules are set out in the Editorial Policy and Advertising Disclosure.

I also can’t promise a course will count toward your requirement. Whether it does depends on your regulator — what they accept as verifiable CPD, whether they require approved providers (ADA CERP and AGD PACE matter a lot in North America), and how they split clinical from non-clinical hours. I’ve written up a country-by-country guide to how the major English-speaking regulators handle this, but your board’s own guidance is always the final word.

Corrections and additions

Providers retire courses, change URLs, and quietly move content behind paywalls. I re-check listings periodically, but with 2,000+ entries some rot is inevitable. If you hit a dead link, or you know a free certificated course I’ve missed, tell me — genuinely, the best additions to this directory have come from readers.