“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”–Jacob Bronowski

I was delighted in November of 2019 to be selected as the next Chair of the Office of Education (OE) by the search committee and the AUA Board of Directors. I readily anticipated a year-plus in the Chair-Elect role learning how to keep the well-oiled machine on track while expanding on the work done by Dr. Vic Nitti and the OE staff. And then (as we all know) COVID-19 hit, thereby impacting best laid plans. While there were many challenges that arose, it also presented an opportunity to adapt and refine our programming, harnessing lessons learned over the past year.

I am, therefore, excited to begin my 4-year term in June 2021 leading the AUA’s Office of Education hoping to bring the best educational content in the most engaging way possible to our AUA members.

From a content perspective, the AUA’s New Technologies and Imaging Committee is doing exciting work mapping out adoption cycles of technologies across various domains (BPH, Endourology, Imaging, and Robotics) to better drive the AUA’s surgical skills training education. This work is reflected in the strong lineup of hands-on courses offered at the annual meeting in Las Vegas, including Introduction to Office-Based Transperineal Prostate Interventions, Prostate MR Imaging, Interventional Ultrasonography, Practical PCNL, Introduction to Prostate Tissue Ablation and Single-Port Robotic Surgery. These courses will be offered foremost with your safety in mind adhering to approved guidelines. Make sure to sign up before these important courses sell out!

If you have not registered for AUA2021–don’t wait! The AUA2021 May Kick-off Weekend will be held virtually from May 21 through 23 and will provide over 35 hours of live educational content. Thereafter, the 2021 Summer School courses (aka AUA2021 Instructional Courses) will run on Tuesdays and Thursdays from June 3 through August. Each of these 24 courses will be offered as a live, virtual, 1.5-hour event and afterwards will be available on-demand if you miss the live activity. Please make sure to sign up for one of our registration packages to access some or all of this great content.

In June, the AUA’s Annual Review (June 4–6) and Fundamentals Courses (June 11–13)–2 long-standing educational programs for residents–will be offered virtually after feedback from training programs. This method of delivery has received very high evaluation results from our learners. In fact, the 2020 Annual Review Course was done virtually in December, and 97% of participants rated it excellent or very good in overall quality, and 99% would recommend the course to others.

In addition to these great live courses, the brand-new SASP app is now available. Since its launch in October 2020, more than 230,000 questions have been answered within the app. Based on type of purchase, you can also sort your questions by year or by topic and create personalized question decks to focus on your areas of improvement. New features will continue to be added to the app including flash card animated decks and a Question of the Day. For the smartphone savvy, the new AUAUniversity mobile app is also in development and will be available later this year.

To access all of these great educational opportunities, go to AUAUniversity at https://auau.auanet.org/. And if you need any assistance, OE staff is always available to help (education@auanet.org), and I am always interested in your feedback.