Building Better Neuro Case Studies: How OTu’s Bookmark Feature Transforms Clinical Education

Teaching neurological rehabilitation is one of the most rewarding—and challenging—aspects of occupational therapy education. Students must connect abstract neuroanatomy to real-world clinical signs, master assessment techniques across multiple domains, and organize their thinking around comprehensive frameworks like the OT Practice Framework. It’s a lot to hold together, and traditional teaching methods don’t always make these connections visible.

That’s why we recently brought together our education team to explore a teaching approach that’s been quietly transforming how faculty organize and present neuro content: comprehensive bookmark case studies built directly within OTu. In a recent webinar, we demonstrated how this feature allows educators to create organized, framework-driven case studies that connect neuroanatomy, assessment tools, and occupation-based evaluation in ways that support genuine learning.

The Challenge of Connecting Knowledge to Practice

One persistent challenge in neuro education is helping students retain foundational neuroanatomy when they reach their clinical practice courses. As Charlotte Chatto, our Neuroscience Education Lead, observed during the demonstration, “By the time the students get to the neuropractice courses, they don’t always remember the neuroanatomy.” This gap isn’t a failure of teaching or learning—it’s simply the reality of how memory works when knowledge isn’t repeatedly connected to meaningful contexts.

The bookmark case study approach addresses this through distributed learning. Instead of treating neuroanatomy as a separate body of knowledge learned once and filed away, these case studies deliberately place relevant neuroanatomical content alongside the clinical assessments and functional observations that reveal its importance. When a student reviews assessment videos for a client with traumatic brain injury, they can simultaneously revisit the cerebellar structures that explain what they’re seeing. Anatomical knowledge isn’t abstract anymore—it’s the key to understanding the clinical picture.

Four Apps, Endless Combinations

OTu provides four interconnected neuro-related apps that form the foundation for building these case studies: NeuroAnatomy, NeuroExam, Neurologic Case Studies, and NeuroRehab. Each contains carefully curated content designed for occupational therapy education.

The NeuroAnatomy app includes an interactive 3D model of the brain and spinal cord, with actual human anatomical slices that are labeled and explained with videos and text. The Neuroanatomy Explorer within the NeuroAnatomy app includes progressively more challenging e-learning activities to build a solid foundation of neuroanatomy for clinical practice.

The NeuroExam app houses assessment demonstrations—everything from the Fugl-Meyer to the Berg Balance Scale to the Function in Sitting Test. These aren’t simulations; they’re videos of actual assessment administration that students can watch, rewatch, and study for technique and clinical reasoning.

The Neurologic Case Studies app is particularly valuable because it features real clients with specific diagnoses—anoxic brain injury, CVA, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and more. You can see the same client across multiple contexts: brushing teeth, navigating a toilet transfer, walking with assistance. This consistency allows students to develop a longitudinal understanding of how a particular condition manifests across different occupational demands.

Finally, NeuroRehab offers treatment-focused content, additional case studies, outcome measures, and evidence-based practice resources including clinical practice guidelines. 

Together, these four apps contain hundreds of videos, demonstrations, and resources—and with a free faculty account, you have access to all of it, whether or not your students have subscriptions.

Building a Framework-Driven Case Study

The real innovation comes in how you organize this content. Rather than simply bookmarking individual videos in no particular order, the comprehensive case study approach structures content according to the OT Practice Framework. This creates a teaching tool that mirrors the way occupational therapists actually think through evaluation and intervention.

During our demonstration, we showed how a complete case study for a client with left MCA CVA is organized into clear sections: relevant neuroanatomy review, subjective examination, and then assessments organized by the practice framework domains—occupations, performance skills and client factors, performance patterns, and contexts. Each section contains bookmarked links to specific OTu videos that address that aspect of the evaluation.

Creating your own version is surprisingly straightforward. When you’re viewing any video in OTu, you’ll see a bookmark icon at the top of the screen. Click it, select “Manage Bookmarks,” and either add it to an existing bookmark group or create a new heading right there. Once you’ve saved several relevant videos, you can go to “My Bookmarks” and drag items to reorganize them under different headings, rename sections, or delete content that doesn’t fit your teaching approach.

The beauty of this system is its flexibility. We’ve created two complete bookmark case studies—one for TBI and one for CVA—that we’re sharing with all faculty. But these aren’t meant to be rigid templates. You can save them to your own bookmarks with a single click, rename them, reorganize the sections to match your course structure, add videos we didn’t include, or remove sections that don’t serve your teaching goals.

Practical Applications Across the Curriculum

Faculty are using this approach in meaningfully different ways depending on their courses and teaching style. In a foundational neuroscience course, you might build a case study that emphasizes the “why” behind functional deficits. When teaching about the cerebellum, for instance, you could immediately pull up the 9-hole peg test video from the TBI case study, helping students see exactly what cerebellar dysfunction looks like in a functional task. This connects abstract anatomy to observable clinical reality in real time.

In a neurorehabilitation course, the same bookmark case study serves a different purpose. Now it becomes a comprehensive evaluation guide that walks students through the entire OT process. You can move seamlessly between your lecture slides and relevant assessment videos, showing students not just what tools to use, but how they’re actually administered with real clients who have real neurological conditions.

Some faculty organize their bookmarks by diagnosis or body system. Others organize by cohort and course, allowing them to track which case studies they’ve used with which groups of students—useful for scaffolding across semesters and for ensuring variety. As one of our faculty consultants noted, “I like that because I teach some of the students across the curriculum… I’m able to see which case studies I’ve used with which cohorts and in which classes.”

Why This Matters for Student Learning

Beyond organizational convenience, this approach supports several evidence-based learning principles. Distributed learning—revisiting content in different contexts over time—strengthens retention far more effectively than massed practice. When students encounter neuroanatomical structures multiple times across different case studies and assessment contexts, they develop the kind of durable knowledge that transfers to clinical practice.

The framework-driven organization also provides cognitive scaffolding. Instead of confronting an overwhelming array of possible assessments, students see evaluation organized the way expert clinicians think about it—systematically addressing occupations, then performance components, then contextual factors. This expert organization becomes internalized through repeated exposure.

Perhaps most importantly, using videos of real clients prevents the abstraction that can plague academic learning. Students don’t just learn that cerebellar damage affects coordination; they see what that actually looks like when someone with TBI attempts a fine motor task. They don’t just memorize that left MCA strokes typically cause right-sided weakness and aphasia; they watch a real client navigate dressing with exactly those challenges. The clinical picture becomes concrete and memorable.

Getting Started

If you’re teaching neurological content and haven’t explored OTu’s bookmark feature yet, the two comprehensive case studies we’ve created offer an easy entry point. The links are available in the webinar resources, and each comes with a simple save function that copies the entire organized case study directly to your bookmarks. From there, you can use them as-is, modify them to fit your course, or use them as models for building entirely new case studies around different diagnoses.

For faculty who want to create their own bookmark case studies from scratch, the process is intuitive once you’ve seen it demonstrated. Start by identifying the key frameworks or organizational structure that makes sense for your course. Create those section headings in your bookmarks. Then browse through OTu’s neuro apps and bookmark relevant videos into the appropriate sections. You can refine and reorganize as you go—nothing is permanent, and the drag-and-drop interface makes reorganization simple.

We’re continuing to expand our faculty support around this feature, with additional webinars scheduled throughout the summer. These sessions cover everything from basic bookmark navigation to advanced teaching strategies, and they’re designed to accommodate various comfort levels with the platform. Whether you’re just discovering the bookmark feature or you’re ready to create sophisticated multi-layered case studies, there’s support available.

Teaching Neuro With Purpose

The bookmark case study approach represents something larger than a clever platform feature. It’s a way of organizing clinical content that mirrors expert thinking, supports evidence-based learning principles, and makes the overwhelming task of teaching neurorehabilitation more manageable for faculty and more coherent for students.

When neuroanatomy sits beside the clinical signs it explains, when assessment videos are organized by the frameworks students need to internalize, and when real clients demonstrate the functional implications of neurological damage—that’s when abstract knowledge transforms into clinical competence. And that’s exactly what occupational therapy education should accomplish.

We invite you to explore these case studies, experiment with the bookmark feature, and share your own approaches to teaching this complex content. The tools are ready. The content is comprehensive. Now it’s about putting them together in ways that serve your students and your teaching style.

If you’d like guidance on getting started, have questions about the bookmark feature, or want to share how you’re using these tools in your own teaching, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to schedule a conversation—we’re always learning from the creative ways faculty make these resources their own.