Using 360-degree video to prepare medical students for internships abroad

Maastricht University students regularly encounter intercultural situations, both in Maastricht and abroad. Preparing them for those situations is not always straightforward.

The pre-departure training already included a 360-degree video, but it focused on the experience of studying at another university. Master’s students in medicine pointed out that their situation would be different. They would be doing an internship in a professional setting, working with colleagues and patients rather than attending classes.

That feedback led to a new video designed around the situations medical students might encounter during an internship abroad.

The Education Innovation Grant was used to create the new 360-degree video. It places students in a clinical setting and includes everyday situations involving hierarchy, punctuality, forms of address, language, feedback and professional behaviour.

These situations are deliberately open to interpretation. The point is not to tell students how people in a particular country behave, or to present one response as right or wrong. Instead, the video gives them something concrete to observe and relate to the intercultural concepts they have studied.

Nynke explains: “A lot of students say, ‘Oh yes, I know this.’ But when you show them a clip with different elements, they realise: ‘I didn’t notice that.’ And then you can discuss it.”

For Nynke, that discussion is central. The aim is to make students more aware that expectations and behaviour can differ and to think about how they might respond, without reducing those differences to stereotypes.

The 360-degree format adds another element: students do not all see the same things. Wearing a VR headset, they decide where to look. Something may be happening on one side of the room while their attention is somewhere else.

Nynke sees a direct connection with what happens outside the classroom: “That’s also how it is in real life: if I’m looking this way, I can’t see what’s happening over there.” 

Afterwards, students compare what they noticed. One student may have picked up on an interaction, gesture or comment that another missed completely.

Nynke had initially wondered whether there would be enough to talk about after the video. In practice, she found the opposite: “Students say, ‘Did you see this?’ and someone else says, ‘Oh, I didn’t see it.’ I thought there might not be much discussion, but there is a lot.”

The differences between what students see become part of the learning. The video gives everyone the same situation, but not necessarily the same experience of it.

The video did not disappear once the grant project ended. It became part of the regular preparation for medical students going abroad and continues to be used with new groups during the year.

The approach has also led to further experimentation. Trainers have made additional short 360-degree recordings of situations abroad that they can use in their own sessions.

For Nynke, however, the main value remains the discussion the video creates. Students watch the same situation but notice different things, giving them a concrete starting point for talking about expectations, interpretation and intercultural awareness.