What You Actually Need to Know About Pace Dental Continuing Education
Pace Dental Continuing Education runs courses online and in person for dentists and dental hygienists looking to keep their licenses current. Their main selling point is flexibility — you can pick up CEs on your own schedule without driving to a conference center or sitting through live lectures. That works well if you run a busy practice and the last thing you want is to carve out a full day for mandatory credits. I've been dealing with CE requirements for going on twelve years now, and Pace is about average compared to other providers. They're not groundbreaking, but they're not a problem either. Here's how it actually works when you go through them.
Pace Dental Continuing Education course selection and timing
When you register through Pace, you get access to a catalog of courses covering core subjects like infection control, radiation safety, ethics, and clinical topics. Most courses are self-paced, meaning you can complete them over a few days or a couple weeks. The content is presented through slides, recorded videos, or sometimes live webinars depending on what you pick. Quizzes follow each module, and you need to pass those to earn your credit hours. The standard turnaround is about forty-five minutes to two hours per three-hour CE course, though clinical topics with more dense material can push past that. They offer bulk packages too if your state requires a minimum number of hours annually and you want to knock them all out at once. One of those packages will usually run you somewhere between one hundred and two hundred fifty dollars depending on the hour count. Here's something most people don't think about until it bites them. Different states have different CE requirements and some states don't accept every provider. Before you buy a bundle from Pace, check that your specific state board recognizes them. I learned this the hard way when I bought a twelve-hour package for my own records and then found out my state had recently changed its approved provider list. That cost me eighty dollars in wasted coursework and about forty-five minutes of phone calls trying to sort it out. Save yourself the headache and verify first.
How the registration and completion process actually goes
Signing up takes about ten minutes. You create an account, select your courses, pay, and then you're in. The dashboard is straightforward — you can track which courses you've started, where you left off, and your completion status. Certificates are downloadable immediately after passing the final quiz for each course. The real time investment isn't the course itself. It's the documentation you need to keep. Each state handles CE tracking differently. Some require you to submit certificates directly to the board. Others just ask you to keep them on file and show them during a random audit. Pace gives you a PDF certificate for each completed course, but you're responsible for knowing what your state expects from there. One edge case that came up for me recently involved a course that was listed as three hours but actually took closer to four hours to complete because the recorded lecture had dead air and slow pacing. The credit hours they assigned don't always match the actual time you spend sitting through it. This matters if you're trying to budget your week and plan around it. My workaround was to check user reviews on independent sites before committing to any course so I could estimate the real time commitment rather than trusting the advertised hours.
Get the Full Details
What Pace does well and where they fall short
Pace handles the basics competently. Their course catalog is broad enough to cover most state requirements, their platform doesn't crash, and customer support actually responds within a business day when you email them. The pricing sits in the middle range — not the cheapest option out there but not a ripoff either. Where they struggle is with course quality consistency. Some instructors are genuinely good at explaining clinical concepts in a way that's useful for everyday practice. Others read directly from slides in a monotone delivery that makes three hours feel like six. There's no quality guarantee built into the system, so you're gambling a bit on each course you pick. Look for courses with higher ratings and more reviews before you commit your time to them. Another limitation worth noting is that Pace doesn't offer live proctoring for courses that require it. If your state mandates that certain CE courses be taken with real-time supervision or attendance verification, Pace may not be the right provider for those specific requirements. A handful of states have gotten stricter about this in recent years, so it's worth checking your board's latest rules rather than assuming anything.
If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, there are free CE sources through state dental associations and a few nonprofit organizations. The tradeoff is that free courses tend to have less polished production and fewer clinical topics. If you need specialized hours in something like sedation dentistry or oral pathology, Pace is probably a safer bet despite the cost because the content is more targeted. The bottom line is that Pace is a functional provider that gets the job done for standard CE requirements. They won't impress you, but they won't waste your money either if you do the basic due diligence before enrolling. Check your state board's approved provider list, read reviews on individual courses, and keep your certificates organized. That's really all there is to it.
