The Year Ahead: Nursing Educational Technology Trends for 2026

Nurse educators and nursing students will be presented with a growing array of educational technologies and those offering them in 2026. Two key works from the National League for Nursing (NLN) validate that nurse educators must be at the forefront of shaping the educational technology of the future. The technology trends for 2026 will continue to have cost, value proposition, and ease of integration as top framing factors. The 2025 Wolters Kluwer (WK) and NLN collaborative survey of more than 300 nursing school faculty and deans provided insights into plans for technology adoption, barriers, and student impacts (WK, 2025). One key area of focus was the growing number of high-risk students, reflecting both increased enrollments but also changing student needs and demographics. Results also highlight the chronic challenges of qualified student capacity limitations and the ongoing need for learning personalization, particularly for high-risk student remediation. Given reporting of greater access to affordable technologies and an increased perception of value, there continues to be optimism that technology can help close these gaps. Respondents also reported budget and technology infrastructure limitations as barriers. These opposing factors will likely have a slowing effect on the broader rates of technology adoption in 2026. The publication of the NLN’s Vision Statement, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Nursing Education (NLN, 2025), is a clear and compelling call to action that will influence faculty development, curricular transformation, and investment on the part of nursing programs in 2026 and beyond. The statement proposes not just technology shifts but cultural and curricular shifts as well. Nurse educators in 2026 will need to actively engage in a time of rapid, AI-driven transformation, whereby integration “is not optional, it is imperative.” A new generation of students will also bring their history with immersive digital learning experiences, exposure to gamification, and perhaps a greater need for nano/microlearning. Their clinical readiness will require the intentional deepening of both faculty and student technological competencies including: ethical decision-making; accountable human oversight of technology, especially as it intrudes into direct patient care decision-making; problem-solving of and with technology; change management and innovation mindsets; and avoidance of overdependence on technology, especially without authoritative source attribution for technology outputs. The top trending nursing educational technologies, both nationally and within the NLN/WK survey results, will most likely continue to be virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies and generative AI. The diverse sets of applications that can be driven by these technologies have enormous potential to drive curricular innovation in nursing education. VR and its related technologies, such as AR and spatial computing in particular, may not fully break out of the hype cycle for most of 2026, despite their potential for transforming psychomotor skills, assessment, psychosocial interactions, and simulation. There do not appear to be massive shifts in the two biggest barriers to their adoption: the high costs of widespread adoption (e.g., headset rigs, licensing) and the limited opportunities for easily aligning content to curriculum and student personalization. Generative AI will continue to be paradoxically disruptive in terms of its academic misconduct concerns, but also its immense value as a teaching, administrative, and research technology. One of the advantages of generative AI over VR/AR technologies is that there are several options that are free or of very low cost for both students and faculty. The year ahead shows no relenting of the uncertainty for higher education with ripple effects on how educational technologies are funded, utilized, and perceived by nurse faculty and students. It is crucial to demonstrate benefits in improved student outcomes to counter the criticism of costs for investments. The NLN/WK survey validates the trends and needs outlined in the NLN AI vision statement and provides a clear roadmap for 2026, with guidance for how to achieve the benefits of existing and emerging educational technologies.