When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in March 2020, the majority of in-person activities, including clinical care and educational conferences, came to a screeching halt. With hospitals required to stop all elective surgeries and clinic visits, telemedicine was quickly assimilated into clinical practice and was widely utilized. Similarly, training programs struggled to provide adequate education to residents who were predominantly furloughed to reduce person-to-person contact. The primary challenge was faculty at each institution were unable to provide enough new educational content to residents to make up for the lost time previously spent on both in-person conferences and clinical care experiences. Thankfully, through great innovation and collaboration, institutions started to realize the importance of pulling resources together to form educational consortium groups.

Following otolaryngology’s collaboration starting at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), the collaborative online video didactics (COViD) lecture series was created for urology.¹ The group was composed of program directors and faculty members at UCSF, the University of Washington, the University of California-Davis, Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and the University of Virginia. An initial outreach email was sent on March 22, 2020 and the first COViD lecture was delivered to residents nationwide on March 30, 2020. Two lectures were available every weekday from March to September 2020, after which lectures were held on a weekly basis. These lectures were available via live Zoom sessions and then made publicly available on YouTube for later viewing.

Shortly after creation of the COViD lecture series, the New York Section of the American Urological Association (AUA) created the Educational Multi-institutional Program for Instructing Residents (EMPIRE) lecture series.² This coalition differed from the COViD lecture series in that it was a trainee-led initiative, and the lectures were preceded by a brief mentoring session with the session’s speaker. The intent was to promote networking and provide opportunities to the viewers to encourage camaraderie and interaction.² Other sections of the AUA and sub-specialty groups began their own initiatives for online virtual learning. The Mid-Atlantic section of the AUA started UroBrief, a series of short videos on high yield topics, many that focus on in-service preparation. Pediatric urologists formed PedsUroFLO (Pediatric Urology Fellowship Lectures Online) as a spin-off from the COViD series, also housed at USCF. Endourologists created EDGE (Endourology Disease Group for Excellence) talks, andrologists created SMILES (SSMR Male Infertility Lecture Education Series), and reconstruction specialists at Case Western created Genitourinary Reconstruction Online Learning Series. Virtual learning became a huge phenomenon as a result of the COVID shutdown.

Figure 1. Post-lecture evaluation data from viewers of COViD lectures as collected via online survey.¹

Figure 2. Resident reported impact of Urology Collaborative Online Video Didactics lecture series on resident education.³

But what happens now as the pandemic slowly subsides? Practices have been picking up their volumes again, some exceeding their normal volumes to make up for lost time. Are these virtual learning programs valuable enough to continue running at full steam? Or like the COVID-19 virus, will online lectures also fade away? Certainly the cost to organize these endeavors is not trivial. These lecture series require immense organization and time from the consortium group to select speakers, schedule lectures, advertise the event, coordinate the production of the lecture, post the recording for later viewing etc. Furthermore, the lecturers devote time to preparing and delivering the lecture, and the learners devote time to watching the lectures. This is made even more difficult with schedules normalizing after the initial shutdown. However, the bright side is that residents do seem to value the new wave of learning. Viewers of the COViD lecture series overwhelmingly felt the sessions were useful to their learning and education (fig. 1), and in a different survey to residents, the majority felt the lecture series had a large or very large impact on their education (fig. 2).^1,3 Additionally, learners do appear to benefit from online learning. Multiple studies prior to the pandemic have cited equal effectiveness of video lectures compared to in-person learning.^4–5 In unpublished data, urology residents scored higher on a knowledge-based test after watching COViD lectures, and a greater improvement in test scores was seen with the more lectures that were watched.³ This may support the continuation of virtual learning and the value it may have for resident education.

Despite the devastation that COVID-19 has caused on the world, the silver lining for urology residents has been the accessibility to online lectures provided by experts in the field and outside their own training programs. While unable to travel to national and regional conferences, residents, students, and faculty were able to gain educational content through these lectures right in their homes. The future of these novel programs is unknown, but one can hope for a hybrid model of in-person learning along with these online lectures to continue to provide residents with this valuable resource. At the very least, a large collection of these archived lectures is available for years to come, and perhaps residents will continue to think of these lectures fondly as they eradicate the memory of COVID-19 forevermore.