From VR Skepticism to a Pedagogy Conversation
How the Michener Institute took a VR simulation program that was working and extended it to learners on screen, and what the debrief revealed about how far they want to take it.
A program that already knows what immersive simulation can do
The Michener Institute of Education at UHN is Canada’s only post secondary institution fully dedicated to the applied health science professions and embedded in a hospital network. Michener educates and trains learners across a wide range of health profession disciplines, and it has a long standing track record of taking simulation seriously. That track record now includes VR. Hasina Jaffer – Academic Chair of Critical Care Programs, Kate Savelberg – Senior Manager for the Centre for the Enrichment of Teaching and Learning (CETL), and Respiratory Therapy lead faculty such as Martha Williams, Jody Saarvala, and Sam Gennidakis, introduced InvolveXR. Learners experienced immersive scenarios in headsets, with strong engagement and a clear read on where immersive practice earns its place in a curriculum.
So the question in front of Michener this year was not whether immersive simulation works for their learners. They had already answered that. The question was how many learners they could reach with it, how often, and without the scheduling and equipment overhead that headset-based delivery carries in a school of Michener’s size.
56
Learners in the cohort
100%
Completed the screen-based Learning Experience
67%
Said it helped them reflect and self-correct
32%
Asked for more cases
Why screen-based, and why now
VR delivers the highest-fidelity version of an immersive case. It also asks for headsets, lab space, a sim tech in the room, and a scheduled block on the calendar. Those constraints are manageable for a cohort of twelve. They become the limiting factor when a program wants every learner in a discipline to run the same case, or wants learners to repeat it on their own time before an assessment.
InvolveXR OnScreen is the desktop modality of the same platform. Same authored cases, same AI patient, same educator control over how a scenario behaves. What changes is the delivery footprint: a laptop and a browser instead of a headset and a lab booking. For Michener, that made it the practical route to scale a pedagogy they had already validated.
This summer they put that to the test. A cohort of 56 learners worked through an anesthesia screening and assessment case in InvolveXR OnScreen. Afterward, Sam Gennidakis, Professor in Respiratory Therapy, sat down with the Lumeto team for a full debrief, covering both the case content and how the experience was delivered from the educator’s side.
What the learners actually did
Learners completed a full patient interview, history, and airway assessment against a realistic, responsive AI patient. Twenty-one learners completed a post-session survey.
Every learner in the cohort finished the Learning Experience. Most completed one to two full case scenarios in a single session.
The case asked learners to do the kind of work a checklist cannot fully capture: adjusting their questions based on what the patient told them, reading unexpected responses, and working through a complete pre-assessment at their own pace rather than on a fixed script.
Some of the patient’s responses were unexpected, which is how it will be in real life.
Where the results landed
Two out of three learners surveyed said the experience helped them reflect on and self-correct their own performance. A similar share said the feedback they received was clear, timely, and relevant to what they needed to learn.
By the end of the session, nearly two-thirds of learners rated their own communication skills as competent or proficient, a meaningful shift for a group working through a scenario many had never encountered before.
The number that mattered most for Michener’s scale question was appetite. Close to a third of learners asked for more cases. When a cohort finishes a screen-based session and comes back asking for additional scenarios, the delivery model has cleared the bar that matters: learners will use it again without being scheduled into a room.
What the numbers showed
Based on 21 post-session survey responses from a 60-learner cohort
Completed the screen-based Learning Experience
Rated their communication skills as competent or proficient afterward
Asked to work through more cases
What this means for your program
The results matter on their own. What mattered more to the Lumeto team was what the debrief conversation was actually about.
Sam and the team spent most of it on pedagogy and reach. How the case was delivered. What worked for learners. Which programs at Michener could run something similar, and how quickly. Leonardo Faundez, a Simulation Educator on Michener’s CETL team, has started sharing his experience internally, and interest is building across other programs at the institution.
That is the real result of this cohort. A program with an established VR practice found a second modality that lets the same clinical reasoning work reach more learners, more often, with less setup. The two are complementary rather than competing: headset sessions for the highest-fidelity moments, screen-based sessions for volume, repetition, and independent practice.
What this means for your program
If you already run immersive simulation and the constraint is reach rather than proof, Michener’s Respiratory Therapy cohort is a useful reference point. Fifty-six learners, full completion, and a third of them asking for more cases, delivered without a headset in the room.
It’s an excellent way for learners to practice critical thinking and work through low-frequency, high-acuity scenarios, anytime, anywhere. Because it’s screen-based, it’s also highly accessible and easy to integrate into learning.
If you are still weighing whether screen-based simulation can carry real clinical reasoning and not just checklist completion, this is what that looks like in practice.