What if your students could meet their future selves?
In an experiment at Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics, students came face to face with an older version of themselves through augmented reality. The experience seemed to change how they thought about saving for retirement.
For Jonas Heller from DEXLab, the experiment raised a bigger question: can immersive technology help students experience things they would otherwise only read or hear about?
In this article, Jonas shares examples of how virtual and augmented reality can create new learning opportunities and offers practical advice for educators interested in experimenting with the technology. He also reflects on what to consider and why reflection is such an important part of the experience.
Read his story below.
A glimpse into the future
A few years ago, in a lab at SBE, I watched a twenty-year-old student stare at her own face. Not her current face. An aged version of it, rendered in augmented reality: wrinkles, grey hair, the works. She laughed first. On most of the participants' faces you could see some thought of surprise when they saw themselves virtually aged. When we asked her afterwards about her retirement savings intentions in a survey, something had shifted, and she, in line with the average responses in this experiment, indicated a higher probability to save for her pension.
This did not happen because she had received information she did not know before; every student in that study already knew that pensions matter and that compound interest rewards the young. The students knew it, just as we all know we should not binge Netflix until 3 am. The problem seemed never to have been a lack of knowledge; rather, her future self felt like a stranger, and we do not sacrifice much for strangers.
That experiment taught me something I have been chewing on ever since: is there a category of learning goals that fail not because the content is difficult, but because students cannot access the experience the content describes? If there is, then for that category immersive technology is a tool worth your attention as an educator.
Putting the question to the test
That question led to See4YourFutureSelf, the follow-up project that our PhD candidate Joana Fernandes Duhamel now runs with Tim Hilken, Max Louwerse and me. The design is deliberately unglamorous. We show young adults their older selves in four ways: a static aged photograph, a voice, a video, and an interactive AR version that moves when they move. Then we measure what each one does to future-self continuity and to the financial decisions that follow.
We are not running that comparison to prove that AR wins. If the printed photograph produces most of the effect at a fraction of the cost and none of the logistics, that is the finding, and we will publish it. Nothing would be more embarrassing for an immersive technology lab than five years spent defending a headset. It is also the question every educator should ask before ordering equipment, and the one that the enthusiasts in the room, myself included, are least eager to hear.
What disruption looks like
Perhaps learning depends less on concrete experience than on unexpected experience. Learning theory has long treated disruption, the moment expectations break, as the trigger for reflection. If that is right, XR is one tool among many for producing productive surprise, competing with a provocative text, a well-timed question, or a field trip that goes sideways.
The aged face is my favourite answer to the question of whether learning needs concrete or unexpected experience, because it is both at once. The student expects a mirror and gets a confrontation, and it arrives through her own body and her own name. Try producing that with a reading assignment.
But notice what the disruption is not. It is not the headset, the resolution or the frame rate. It is three seconds of silence, and the technology is merely the most reliable way I have found to produce it. XR holds no monopoly on disruption. Its monopoly is on disruptions you can stage safely, repeat on demand, and debrief inside a two-hour tutorial.
Where disruption stops being productive
This is the part I have become careful about. The virtually aged face was a laboratory study. Any educator reading this will want to take something like it into a classroom, which is where it stops being my experiment and starts being someone's Monday morning tutorial session. In the lab, that moment sits inside a scaffolding nobody notices until it is missing: ethics review, informed consent, a trained researcher, a debrief protocol, and a participant who can walk out with no consequences. A tutorial group has none of that scaffolding. The student cannot leave invisibly, the person running the session grades her, and the classmate beside her sees her face.
That leaves me with four rules for turning an experiment into education:
- Never end on the disruption. The broken expectation is the set-up, the reflection is the lesson. A session that runs out of time before the debrief has delivered the discomfort and skipped the learning. So place the disruptive moment early in the session, and protect the time for the reflection that follows.
- The opt-out has to be free and invisible. Why offer one at all, if disruption is the point? Because a disruption a student cannot refuse stops being an invitation to reflect and becomes something done to her. The point is not that students skip it; knowing they could is what makes it safe to step in. And the opt-out only works if it costs nothing: not “you can sit this one out”, announced to a room of 15 students, but a parallel route arranged beforehand (e.g. a note on Canvas) that is not visibly the lesser option.
- Keep the experience out of the grade. Nobody marks a student on the face she makes inside a headset, but an assessed reflection report (or presentation) about the experience does, in effect. Attach a mark to “write up what you experienced” and you will receive what the student believes you want to read. Grade the analysis, the design, the argument, but leave the experience itself ungraded.
- Know what you cannot catch. An aged face lands differently on a student whose father died at fifty-two. A poverty simulation lands differently on a student who does not have to simulate it. If your intervention can open something you cannot close, you need a colleague in the room and a route to student support, or a milder version. In practice, that starts with one plain question before the session: for which student could this go wrong, and how would I notice?
Which leaves the harder question: how careful should we be, if disruption is part of how people learn? I do not have a clean answer, and I doubt one exists. Some discomfort is the price of learning anything that matters. The tipping point, as far as I can tell, is where a student leaves the session busy coping with the experience instead of thinking about it. Where that point lies depends on your students, your subject and the support around you, so decide it before the session, ideally with a colleague, not during it. Where do you draw that line?
The aged face is just an example. You can replace it with a virtual visit to a factory in Bangladesh, a virtual emergency room, or a stock-trading day in a virtual stock exchange. Yet, disruption is a dose, not a switch, and the right dose is the smallest one that still breaks the expectation. One or two of these moments over a whole course is usually enough. Yet we tend to reach for the largest disruption, because the largest is what impresses colleagues in the corridor.
When the slide deck wins
XR is unsuitable for many learning goals, and that is fine. If students need to know something, a sharp lecture, a good reading and a well-run discussion are hard to beat at a fraction of the cost. If they need to practise something that can be practised in the room, let them practise it in the room. And if reality is available, use reality: a real patient, a real port, a real customer who is genuinely angry with you beats every simulation ever built.
The bandwidth where XR earns its place is narrow but real: experiences that are impossible, unsafe, unaffordable or unrepeatable, and goals that require students to feel something before they can think about it. You cannot send every student into a patient's home, make a twenty-year-old poor for an afternoon, or introduce anyone to the seventy-year-old they will become.
What colleagues are already doing
Since 2021, more than 1,500 SBE students have rehearsed presentations in VR: simulated rooms, AI-generated questions, and the mildly painful business of watching yourself back. Ask them what mattered and they do not mention the headset. What stayed with them was hearing themselves speak. At FHML, a nine-minute 360-degree video of a patient home visit outperformed a fieldwork substitute on empathy measures. At SBE, PhD candidate Stefan Bos built “Een dag arm” ("A day in poverty"), fifteen minutes of financial scarcity: impossible trade-offs, letters that cannot be paid, the cognitive load of poverty. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal (Toeslagenaffaire) inspired it. Every one of these projects had to decide what happens in the ten minutes after the headset comes off.
The equipment, honestly
Anyone who calls bringing XR into a classroom seamless is selling something. The VR-enhanced PBL project at UM, documented in the EDLAB report, found the friction you would expect: headsets need charging and cleaning, they break, some students opt out, staff face a real learning curve, and the first session always overruns. Yet educators who survive that first uncomfortable semester rarely go back. XR earns a specific place in their teaching, sometimes a five-minute place, and it stays there.
How to start without suffering alone
Colleagues rarely ask me whether VR works. They ask how to begin, and where to find a usable 360-degree video. Here is what I tell them. Skip the information gathering and find the people who have already made the mistakes for you. The UM XR Network connects educators across faculties. Every faculty has an XR representative who knows what is available, the University Library has opened Digital Labs with headsets, and the Limburg Immersive Technologies (LIT) Network pools infrastructure and hard-won lessons across UM and Zuyd.
Then start small. Borrow a headset, spend five minutes learning the controllers, five browsing the library on the device, and, if you like, five as a piece of toast. There is an application for that. It is funny, and it is the mechanism in its purest form: this technology puts you in someone else's shoes, paws or crust.
After that, one question is enough. Which moment in your course do your students only read about, when they could be standing inside it?
I do not know whether that student ever opened a pension account. I know that for three seconds she was not being told about her future. She was looking at it. That is a teaching moment, and one of the very few a machine can produce reliably at 11 on a Monday morning.
By Jonas Heller, Assistant Professor at the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics and Co-Founder and Scientific Director of DEXLab, Maastricht University's innovation lab for digital and immersive technologies, and Co-Founder of the Limburg Immersive Technology Network. Maastricht University.
This article is a publication of edUMinded, the Maastricht University online magazine on Teaching & Learning.