This resource came about during a skills review prior to our Salt Lake Community College students starting their first level II fieldwork. The session provided an opportunity for students to practice some key skills in a physical dysfunction setting. When we got to Fall Recovery, all the students looked confused. One brave student said, “We never learned that.” I was flabbergasted. I reviewed my course schedules and then told the students, “No, I taught you this during our class on Advanced Mobility on November 14, 2019.” Immediately upon the words leaving my mouth, I realized that was the stupidest sentence I have said as an instructor—ask my students, there have been some doozies. I taught the material on that date, but it was obvious that students had not learned it.

I consider myself a competent teacher. Our students do well during their fieldworks and on the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy (NBCOT) exams. However, it was clear to me that our students would benefit from more support with skills learning. I went in search for other resources or texts to support our students’ skills learning, but wasn’t satisfied by anything I found. I reflected on my own learning and talked with my students about the resources they use to learn clinical skills. Across the board, the universal answer was that when needing to learn skills, neither students nor I looked to textbooks—we turned to the internet and YouTube. This made me think about some of my recent conversations about Open Educational Resources (OER). Would it be possible to create an OER to support skills learning as an occupational therapy (OT) practitioner in a physical dysfunction setting? How could I build it around videos and web pages that teach skills? One thing led to another and here we are with Occupational Therapy Skills for Physical Dysfunction.

This resource is built around the skills taught in the physical dysfunction course sequence of Salt Lake Community College’s Occupational Therapy Assistant program. Our physical dysfunction course sequence is taught over the program’s first two semesters with a three-hour lecture and three-hour lab each semester. The first half of the first course focuses on the body structures and functions from the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process, 4th Edition. This focus gives students a conceptual framework in which to understand the specific dysfunctions and conditions covered in the remainder of the course. As well, I have attempted to organize the courses starting with simpler concepts and building to more complex. As a result, this resource may not initially reflect how your physical dysfunction courses are structured; indeed, it highlights the strengths of OER.

This OER is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license. For those of you not familiar with Creative Commons licensure this means that you are invited to use, change, and adapt this resource, as long as you don’t charge others for access and that you cite the original work. So, feel free to customize this resource to support your unique teaching and learning needs.

This OER has dramatically shifted how I structure and teach my classes. The OER has allowed me to flip the classroom. Students review the OER prior to class, then, classroom time can be used to maximize learning. This structure has allowed more time for students to practice skills and for me to teach advanced skills. As well, I have structured each class period around a case study. The case study asks students to use clinical reasoning and apply the skills they’ve learned. Student feedback has been extremely positive, for example one student writes, “[T]his allows the lab to follow more of a “flipped classroom” style. Flipped classrooms can be beneficial so that there is more time for actually doing. If we didn’t have the OER information, we would have to learn that content in the classroom, taking up lab time. We get to have more time gaining mastery by doing, and as OTs we are all about the doing.” Janessa Hansen, SLCC OTA Class of 2023. 

I would like to acknowledge numerous individuals for supporting and contributing to this resource. First, I would like to thank the students from the Salt Lake Community College Occupational Therapy Assistant classes of 2022 and 2023. We used an open pedagogy model where students are involved in creating content. My students were involved in captioning videos, locating supporting resources, and writing text drafts for each chapter. The students’ contribution was invaluable, and as a result, they are credited as co-authors for each chapter. I have edited the students’ work, but have tried to preserve their words and sentiment.

Second, I would like to thank Salt Lake Community College for supporting this project. The Office of Information Technology assisted with providing a high-resolution camera and wireless microphone for recording. The Office of Learning Management and the Open SLCC Group has been essential for completing this project. They have provided financial support, technical training, mentorship, library research, editing, and copyright review. In particular, I want to thank Andrea Scott, Jen Hughes, and Linda Bult for their support and assistance.