Introduction. In recent years, the system of postgraduate education in medicine has faced new challenges and need for improvement. Nowadays the old «once in a lifetime» model becomes impossible, and the traditional education models are giving way to innovative forms of distance education.
Purpose. The purpose of the article is to present the experience of organizing distance education courses for urologists, andrologists, oncourologists and doctors of related specialties.
Educational materials and methods. In 2011 the authors created UroEdu.ru to provide urologists and doctors of related specialties with unique educational materials created on the basis of the latest achievements in urological science, presented by the leading world and domestic leaders in the sphere.
Results. In the period from 2012 to 2019 there were implemented 40 distance education courses as part of the project. The official language of the educational resource UroEdu.ru is Russian. Almost all courses have current and final control of the knowledge level. The total number of lectures in all courses in this period was 489, and the teaching staff was represented by 160 lecturers, including 140 domestic specialists and 20 foreign ones. Among the Russian teachers there were 74 Dr. Sci. with the rank of Professor or associate Professor. Also there were 85 Ph.D. of Medical Sciences who worked at various research institutes or urology departments at various medical universities. The total number of non-unique participants in all lectures was 27040 specialists, 8320 – unique specialists. Among 27040 participants, registered for the first lecture, only 10142 (37.5%) attended 50% of the course lectures, and 9902 (36.6%) attended all the course lectures. Therefore, 97.6% of doctors who attended half of the course lectures, exactly complete it.
Conclusions. The distance courses format as a good additional method of obtaining professional knowledge in a continuous mode.
Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
