Across our universities, students and staff experience constant change in how learning happens. New technologies are introduced, systems are updated, and learning is designed to respond to student expectations, the job market, and broader social shifts. These changes usually come with good intentions and the promise of better learning.
It is easy to assume that digital changes will automatically make learning more inclusive. For example, sometimes we can expect that providing online or hybrid learning will naturally widen participation. Research and lived experience suggest it is rarely that simple.
Across my research, I consistently focus on how educational ideas, innovation, and change are experienced in practice by students navigating learning and by staff supporting it.
One area where this complexity shows up clearly in my work is digital learning, particularly virtual simulation. Virtual simulation can expand access to authentic learning when professional placements or specialist resources are limited. In health professional education, placements play a key role in developing professional capability. Yet these experiences are often uneven and can occur by chance, meaning students do not always encounter the same learning opportunities. Simply adding new technology, however, does not automatically improve learning.
During the pandemic, I led a pivot to virtual simulation (informed by ongoing research) to address limited placement opportunities and deliberately support students’ capability development in Australia and India. This work focused on how virtual simulation can shape capability, for example, by embedding structured decision making, reflection, and feedback into simulations so students could practise clinical reasoning without consequences for themselves or others in a supported environment.
In my recent studies, I have explored how virtual simulation can offer something different within the curriculum. For example, virtual simulation can make students’ thinking visible at a time when generative AI has made it harder to use traditional approaches to assess capabilities such as critical thinking. Within simulations, students enact decisions as they work through clinical scenarios, showing how they reason and respond, rather than only submitting final answers to questions. By intentionally designing virtual simulation as an inclusive learning environment and modelling inclusive professional practice, this approach can better support diverse learners and help students develop inclusive ways of working. These insights matter because they strengthen education systems to better prepare graduates for professional practice.
My work also shaped research that informed the shift to university-wide Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approaches. BYOD is often described as an efficiency change but in practice, removing shared computers affects far more than infrastructure. It reshapes who can participate in learning, how learning is supported, and where responsibility sits for access and preparation. The research required listening closely to student experiences and paying attention to how learning activities, expectations, and institutional support systems needed to respond as challenges emerged, viewing BYOD as part of a broader learning ecosystem.
For me, research helps move conversations beyond good intentions towards a clearer understanding of how educational change plays out in everyday learning. It is about using research to design education with intention, so learning develops professional capabilities as education systems and workforce expectations continue to change.
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