Nursing faculty perspectives on integrating emerging technologies in undergraduate nursing education: A qualitative...

Emerging technologies (ET), including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality alongside simulation-based tools, are increasingly available for undergraduate nursing education, yet their institutional and pedagogical integration remains uneven. Nursing faculty are central to this process, but their own experiences and perceptions of adopting ET have received limited empirical attention.

To explore nursing faculty's experiences and perceptions of integrating emerging technologies into undergraduate nursing education.

Qualitative descriptive study with a contextual quantitative component.

Three university nursing faculties in Spain.

Twenty-two nursing faculty members.

Three focus groups were conducted and analyzed using template analysis, a form of thematic analysis. An ad hoc questionnaire provided descriptive data on participants' self-reported experience with specific technologies, used to contextualize the qualitative findings.

Three themes emerged: Resources and Integration, Teaching and Learning, and Navigating the Digital Divide in Nursing Education. Faculty recognized the pedagogical value of ET, particularly of well-established tools such as high-fidelity simulation, but identified limited institutional support, unequal training opportunities, and concerns about preserving humanistic and relational aspects of care as central barriers. Low-cost technologies already accessible to most institutions were seen as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, theoretical instruction.

Nursing faculty view emerging technologies as pedagogically valuable but constrained by institutional support, training, and equity considerations. Because this study captures the perspective of faculty only, future research should examine how nursing students experience these same tensions.