A letter from the e-Learning Ambassador

Many of you will have been able to enjoy the wide variety of learning opportunities afforded to attendees at the 13^th Congress of ECCO, held in Vienna on February 14-17, 2018. However, since ECCO Congresses are often busy times and it is difficult to attend all the lectures and courses, why not visit the e-CCO e-Library? Here you will find a wealth of material recorded at the biggest ECCO Congress to date: What better way is there to catch up on the talks you missed or to refresh your memory on the talks you attended than to sit at your leisure and pick and choose the content you wish to view?

Alternatively, perhaps you were not able to attend this year, in which case you might consider listening to the thoughts of the then President and President-Elect, Julian Panes and Silvio Danese, in a Talking Heads video in which they discuss their scientific highlights from the Congress. After all, given the fact that you can access the talks from the plenary sessions, as well as the content from the IBD Intensive Advanced Course and the rest of the educational programme, why not allow the experts to lead you in the right direction? And in case that isn’t enough, you can also access all the accepted abstracts on the e-CCO Learning site. 

Also recorded at the Congress was the latest in the series of Transatlantic Talking Heads, a collaboration between the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and ECCO in which a hot topic is debated by experts from the United States and Europe or, to be more accurate in this video, Brazil, as Paulo Kotze (formerly a member of S-ECCO and now part of EduCom) represents ECCO in a fascinating discussion about the management of biologics in patients undergoing IBD surgery. 

Beyond the Congress, there is also plenty of new content on the e-CCO Learning site. For example, two new e-Courses will soon be available covering “Paediatric UC” and “Complementary Medicine and Psychotherapy”.

One of the roles of the e-Learning Taskforce has been to map the content of the e-CCO Learning site to the IBD Curriculum, which represents a comprehensive outline of the areas that IBD physicians need to know. Therefore, as new content is created, gaps in the Curriculum are filled. It is for this reason that the forthcoming Skills Videos, initially focussing on a variety of endoscopic skills that play a hugely important part in day-to-day management of IBD, represent an exciting and important addition to the e-CCO portfolio.

Before I sign off, if you have never had a look at the wealth of e-CCO Learning material available to you as an ECCO Member, I would really encourage you to take a few minutes to see what is on the site. It’s a great way to keep up to date in the increasingly complex world of IBD management. And if you’ve already visited, then please spread the word, and come and visit again soon.