Editor’s note: This article was updated in August 2025 to reflect new insights from clinical education webinars and developments in nursing and dental education.
Deans, program leaders, and the #many and varied figures that populate the upper echelons of higher education settings don’t need reminding of the pressures they face.
From limited access to clinical placements to mounting expectations around student readiness and academic progression, the question for university leaders is no longer whether to integrate educational technology, but how to do so in ways that offer genuine value at scale.
The trends below represent some of the most impactful approaches being used to support learners, optimize delivery, and strengthen institutional resilience. Each is backed by emerging evidence and aligned with the core priorities that deans and decision-makers must navigate in 2025 and beyond.
1. Augmented Reality and Interactive Simulations
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are redefining how healthcare students bridge the gap between theory and clinical practice. They can, for example, allow students to practice dental examinations or restorative procedures in a virtual clinic, complete with simulated patient responses and real-time feedback.
The literature on the efficacy of AR (and VR) is promising. According to a 2024 umbrella review published in Frontiers in Digital Health, these immersive technologies have been associated with a range of beneficial outcomes, with a particular focus on positive effects and impacts across:
- Performance
- Engagement
- Effectiveness
For institutional leaders, access to these technologies has significant implications for navigating the practical difficulties that healthcare education presents. While digital simulation can’t act as a full replacement for traditional approaches to clinical skill development, the fact remains that universities and colleges face unavoidable limitations in terms of clinic time, lab space, and reserves of volunteer patients (especially those willing to be exposed to beginner clinicians!).
As such, any means of allowing students to safely and repeatably practice these core skills at any time and in any location simply can’t be overlooked by institutional leaders with graduate readiness in mind.
MORE ON THE BENEFITS OF SIMULATION-BASED LEARNING | ‘Embracing Digital Transformation in Healthcare Education Without Replacing Traditional Teaching’
2. Microlearning: Bite-Sized Retention, Big-Time Leverage
Microlearning (delivering content in precise, focused bursts) is a familiar trend, but one that’s increasingly backed by evidence of its effectiveness.
This is especially true in nursing contexts: a randomized 2022 study at Shiraz University, for example, showed that nursing students who used microlearning for clinical topics improved their self‑efficacy compared to traditional instruction, meaning that they felt more capable of applying their learning with confidence.
Another quasi-experimental study published in BMC Medical Education found microlearning to enhance trauma care knowledge and learner satisfaction: a critically important outcome in fast‑paced clinical contexts.
For institutions concerned about remediation rates and academic progression, these findings clearly point to microlearning as a targeted support mechanism. If analytics show a spike in pharmacology failures or low confidence in clinical skills, faculty can plug gaps with focused revision modules (without needing to overhaul an entire course). In this way, microlearning acts as a precision tool for:
- Reducing resits
- Protecting progression pipelines
- Improving retention outcomes across high-risk topics
SEE HOW DIGITAL LEARNING STRATEGIES CAN IMPROVE GRADES | ‘How Immersify’s Simulation-Based Learning Transformed UCLA Dental Students Into Trusted Prescribers’
3. Blended Learning and the Rise of Reverse Teaching
Blended learning models, which combine online content delivery with face-to-face classroom interaction, are well-established in higher education. But in the context of healthcare training, the most impactful form they take is arguably the flipped classroom model: a reverse teaching approach in which students study core material asynchronously and use classroom time for discussion, application, and coaching.
From a pedagogical standpoint, flipped learning comes with plenty of advantages. Per one 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Education, flipped classrooms in healthcare education settings have been shown to surpass traditional teaching across:
- Theoretical scores
- Composite scores
- Skills scores
But for institutional leaders, Immersify’s own webinars have highlighted flipped learning as a direct solution to one of the more pressing concerns facing universities: faculty burnout.
As Dr. JoAnn Gurenlian (ADHA) pointed out, flipped learning holds the ability to reduce lecture fatigue and increase job satisfaction by transforming how educators use their time. When students come to class already primed with foundational knowledge, educators are free to teach at a higher level, focusing on skills like clinical reasoning, critical thinking, and patient communication: the very competencies that shape institutional reputation and graduate readiness.
RELATED READING | ‘5 Benefits of Flipped Learning for Universities and Colleges’
4. Learning Analytics: Data-Driven Support at Scale
Learning analytics platforms have obvious and widely regarded benefits from an educator-level vantage point, offering opportunities to proactively intervene in any problem areas before students start to fall behind.
From the bird’s-eye perspective of a dean or similar university leader, these advantages hold a huge amount of institutional value. Beyond the individual benefits of allowing institutions to support at-risk students early, the right analytics (particularly those that correspond to learning content aligned with curricula) can ensure that patterns of disengagement can be addressed before they escalate into dropout.
Given that nursing schools can have high attrition rates (21% in England, for example, according to the Royal College of Nursing), this familiar concept is receiving constant injections of new and urgent life in 2025 and beyond.
SEE HOW PERSONALIZATION AND ANALYTICS UNDERPIN FUTURE-READY EDUCATION | ‘How Education 4.0 is Transforming Healthcare Learning’
5. Gamification: Engagement That Drives Skill Retention
Gamification, the use of game-like features such as scoring, progression, and feedback, has seen renewed attention in healthcare education for its role in improving learner engagement and retention.
A 2024 study in the British Journal of Nursing found that educational games within simulated settings were “effective in improving participants' ability to observe procedures, bridging the gap between theory and practice while enhancing students' learning experience. The gamification technique, which included interactive scenarios and challenges, resulted in effective learning and better outcomes.”
While these improved learning outcomes are, of course, an end unto themselves, the BJN study highlights the substantial benefits of adopting this practice in a healthcare context. In resource-constrained programs, gamified simulations offer a scalable, low-risk way to:
- Boost repetition
- Reduce passive learning,
- Enhance clinical readiness
And, crucially, this practice exposes students to the all-important practical elements of a clinical education without the need to expand contact hours or increase the ever-constrained number of clinical placements or volunteer patients available.
SEE SIMULATED NURSING SCENARIOS IN ACTION | ‘Simulation Spotlight: ABCDE Assessments Q&A’
Ready to Put the Trends Into Practice?
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