Launch the new year with ATu’s powerful and comprehensive Orthopaedics app! Organized by body region and diagnosis, the app offers two ways to access content:
- Explore: Users choose how they want to learn – by examining common injury signs and symptoms, by following established clinical practice guidelines, or by reviewing all diagnoses
- Quick Access: Provides all relevant content in one place for rapid reference, without organization by diagnosis
Join us to explore the full scope of the app, learn how its structure and content align with CAATE Standards, and preview upcoming webinars that will dive into each content area. This session is ideal for both new and experienced orthopaedic educators and sets the foundation for teaching students from observation to intervention.
Featured Speaker: Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC
An athletic training professional for 30 years, Dr. Schmidt’s career spans clinical care, academic leadership, and professional service. From treating patients across diverse settings to shaping undergraduate and graduate programs, he’s a contributor in the field, influencing best practices through research and committee roles with the NATA and CAATE. His passion extends to curriculum design, interprofessional education, and youth sports injury prevention, helping to shape the future of athletic training.
00:00 Welcome & Ortho App Webinar Series Introduction
02:13 Key Questions While Teaching Orthopedics
03:59 Using ATu to Support Students Through the Entire Curriculum
05:41 Overview of ATu, New AI-Augmented Search Bar!, Free Faculty Access
07:24 App Demo: App Information, Curricular Standards Guide, Teaching Resources, Faculty Resource Guide
15:31 App Demo: Body Region Clinical Pattern Recognition, Clinical Practice Guidelines, and All Diagnosis
20:55 App Demo: Example of a Lumbopelvic Body Region Pathology – Lumbar Disc Disorder
21:50 App Demo: Prevalence, Clinical Findings
22:23 App Demo: Physical Exam, Movement Faults, Associated Impairments, Differential Diagnosis
24:01 App Demo: Interventions, Manual Therapy, Therapeutic Exercises, Patient Education, Modalities
26:30 App Demo: Outcome Measures
27:20 App Demo: Body Region Quick Access
28:53 Upcoming Faculty Webinar Series Schedule: Ortho App
30:01 Coming Soon! KinesioU – Supporting Faculty and Students in Kinesiology
31:44 Share Your Feedback & Thanks for Watching!
Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo
From Classroom to Lab to Clinic: How the ATu Orthopaedics App Transforms Musculoskeletal Education
If you’ve ever taught orthopedic assessment and intervention, you know the challenge intimately. There’s the sheer volume of content to cover – every body region, dozens of pathologies, countless special tests, therapeutic interventions, and manual therapy techniques. Then there’s the deeper pedagogical puzzle: how do you move students beyond memorization toward genuine clinical reasoning? How do you help them connect what they learn in lecture to what they practice in the lab, and ultimately to what they’ll encounter with real patients?
These questions have driven our work at ATu for years, and they’re at the heart of why we built the Orthopaedics app the way we did. In our recent faculty webinar, we took a comprehensive look at this resource – not just as a reference tool, but as a complete educational ecosystem designed to support athletic training students throughout their entire curriculum.
A Resource That Grows With Your Students
Before diving into the Orthopaedics app specifically, it’s worth noting that ATu has evolved into a comprehensive platform of 38 total apps spanning the full athletic training curriculum. From foundational skills like surface anatomy and palpation through advanced clinical competencies like diagnostic imaging and pharmacology, we’ve designed resources that support students from day one through professional practice readiness.
The Orthopaedics app sits within this broader ecosystem, but it’s comprehensive enough to deserve its own deep exploration. That’s why we’re dedicating an entire webinar series to unpacking its features – because there’s genuinely that much there.
Rethinking How We Teach Orthopedics
The Orthopaedics app emerged from a fundamental shift in how we approach musculoskeletal education. For years, the traditional model started with pathology – here’s a rotator cuff tear, here are the signs and symptoms, here are the positive special tests. Students dutifully memorized these lists, performed well on exams, and then struggled to actually diagnose patients in clinical settings.
The problem? We were teaching memorization, not clinical reasoning.
The Orthopaedics app takes a different approach through its Clinical Pattern Recognition feature. Instead of starting with the diagnosis, students begin with observable signs and symptoms – exactly how they’ll encounter patients in real life. A patient presents with diffuse, achy pain radiating down the leg. What could this be? Students explore the clinical patterns, consider differential diagnoses, and learn to connect the dots between assessment findings, interventions, and outcomes.
This signs-and-symptoms approach mirrors authentic clinical practice and develops the inquisitive, curiosity-driven thinking that distinguishes expert clinicians from novices. But we also recognize that students need different entry points depending on where they are in their learning journey. That’s why the app offers multiple pathways: Clinical Pattern Recognition for developing diagnostic reasoning, direct access to published Clinical Practice Guidelines for evidence-based learners, and a complete All Diagnosis list for those who need the traditional reference format.
Comprehensive Content Across the Care Continuum
One of the most distinctive features of the Orthopaedics app is that it refuses to silo information. Rather than separating assessment from intervention from therapeutic exercise, everything is integrated within pathology-specific pathways. For each of the 68 common musculoskeletal conditions covered, students can explore the complete clinical picture.
Take lumbar disc disorder as an example. Students don’t just learn the special tests – they work through clinical findings, movement faults and associated impairments, relevant assessments for adjacent regions, differential diagnosis considerations, and then progress into interventions. Manual therapy techniques, therapeutic exercises organized by healing phase (mobility, motor control, strengthening, functional movement), appropriate modalities, patient education resources, and relevant outcome measures are all there, connected and contextualized within the patient care pathway.
This integration is intentional. It helps students understand that assessment informs intervention, that therapeutic exercise selection depends on where the patient is in the healing process, and that outcome measures should align with the specific pathology and treatment goals. These connections – often invisible when content is taught in separate courses or units – become explicit and reinforced through the app’s structure.
Supporting Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning
Every body region includes clinical reasoning videos – short, focused mini-lectures that highlight key decision-making points in the diagnostic and treatment process. These aren’t lengthy productions; they’re typically two to four minutes of expert insight on topics like interpreting physical exam findings, selecting appropriate interventions, or considering differential diagnoses.
All content is mapped to Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE) curricular content standards and relevant Board of Certification (BOC) exam references. For the Orthopaedics app specifically, this includes Standard 69 (developing a care plan), Standard 71 (performing examinations to formulate diagnoses and a care plan), and Standard 73 (selecting and incorporating interventions). When clinical practice guidelines exist, they’re hyperlinked directly to PubMed and the National Library of Medicine so students and faculty can access the original research.
The demonstration videos themselves provide standardized, consistent motor skill instruction. Students can watch techniques repeatedly, at their own pace, whenever they need a refresher – before class to prepare, during class to reinforce learning, after class to practice, or in the clinic when they need just-in-time support.
Resources That Save You Time
We know faculty are stretched thin. That’s why we’ve created 68 pre-made, hyperlinked worksheets that align with the pathologies in the Orthopaedics app. These aren’t generic handouts – they guide students through the complete clinical pathway for specific conditions, with embedded links back into relevant app content and clinical pattern recognition questions that develop critical thinking.
Perhaps most importantly, these worksheets are fully customizable. They’re shared as Google documents, so you can download and adapt them to fit your specific course design, terminology preferences, or curricular sequence. Maybe you’re only teaching assessment this semester and want to save the intervention portion for a later course – no problem. The worksheets are your starting point, not a constraint.
We’ve also created a faculty resource guide that serves as a master table of contents for the entire Orthopaedics app, with hyperlinks to each body region and pathology. It’s a small thing, but it saves countless clicks when you’re trying to find specific content quickly.
From the Classroom to the Lab to the Clinic
The real power of the Orthopaedics app lies in how it bridges the traditional gaps between classroom instruction, laboratory practice, and clinical application. In lecture, faculty can pull up demonstration videos in real time, capturing teachable moments as they emerge. Students can follow along on their own devices, accessing the same content simultaneously.
In the lab, those same videos become practice resources. Students aren’t trying to remember what the instructor demonstrated last week – they can review the standardized technique as many times as needed to develop motor skill proficiency. The clinical reasoning videos help them understand not just *how* to perform an assessment or intervention, but *why* they’re doing it and what they’re looking for.
Then, when students transition to clinical education, the entire resource travels with them. Working with a preceptor on a patient with suspected sciatica? The relevant clinical pathway is available on their phone. Forgot the positioning for a specific manual therapy technique? The demonstration video is there. Need to select an appropriate outcome measure? The hyperlinked PDFs are ready to download.
This continuity across learning environments reinforces knowledge, supports skill development, and builds the confidence students need to perform competently in authentic clinical settings.
Looking Ahead
The Orthopaedics app represents years of work from a multidisciplinary team of educators who face the same challenges you do every day. We built it because we needed it ourselves – and because we believe athletic training education can move beyond memorization toward genuine clinical expertise.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be diving deeper into specific features: the physical exam section, movement faults and impairments, special tests, manual therapy techniques, and therapeutic exercise progressions. We’ll also explore the orthopaedic simulations that allow students to apply their knowledge in realistic clinical scenarios.
But the best way to understand what the Orthopaedics app can do for your teaching and your students’ learning is to explore it yourself. Faculty receive complimentary access to all 38 ATu apps, along with all the teaching resources we’ve created. We invite you to dive in, experiment with different features, and see how it might enhance your spring courses.
Whether you’re teaching foundational orthopedic assessment, advanced therapeutic interventions, or clinical reasoning across the curriculum, we’d be honored to support your work. After all, we’re educators too – and we’re all working toward the same goal of preparing the next generation of exceptional athletic trainers.
