KLU’s innovative learning gains international recognition
The QEII Centre in London hosted this week the QS Reimagine Education Conference, one of the world’s leading stages for educational innovation. Among more than 1,600 submissions across 18 award categories, KLU’s Virtual Reality Humanitarian Logistics Simulation – a project developed under the teaching scope of Prof. Maria Besiou – stood as a finalist for the Immersive Experiential Learning Award, placing it in the top 20% of projects worldwide. With a highly competitive category and other strong projects (like the final winner, "Tec Factory Park" from Tecnológico de Monterrey), the humanitarian logistics project did not take home the award. Nonetheless, the nomination itself marks an important milestone in KLU’s commitment to pioneering new learning formats and pushing the boundaries of practice-oriented education. It is a strong recognition of the vision, creativity, and academic excellence driving KLU’s innovative teaching approaches.
To learn more about the motivations behind the project and the value of immersive tools like VR in logistics education, we spoke with Prof. Besiou, who co-developed the simulation in cooperation with Prof. Harwin de Vries from the Rotterdam School of Management. She shared her insights on how technologies like VR can elevate learning outcomes and prepare students for real-world complexity.
What inspired you to develop a VR simulation for humanitarian logistics, and how does it differ from traditional teaching formats in this field?
Our long-running, full-day humanitarian logistics simulation already delivered strong learning, but we realized that the on-campus setting limited immersion. We wanted the students to feel the stakes without leaving the classroom. How? With Virtual Reality! We transformed the stakeholder-interaction phase into a facilitator-controlled, group-specific 360° experience set in a post-earthquake response. Instead of everyone watching the same clip, different teams receive different briefs (e.g., one NGO has 20 truckloads of water in Copenhagen but no trucks; another has empty trucks departing today), forcing information sharing across groups and negotiation under pressure. VR does not replace open-ended problem solving; instead, it amplifies realism and urgency while preserving student autonomy outside the headset.
This simulation shows KLU’s hands-on and innovative approach. Instead of the traditional “read – discuss” of a case, the students enter this crisis setting with another angle: “experience – decide – defend”. The facilitator triggers different videos/headsets at different times, mirroring real-time injects, allowing for a dynamic experience that brings problem-solving learning to the next level.
How does this project contribute to better decision-making and learning outcomes for future logistics professionals, especially in high-pressure humanitarian settings?
Humanitarian logistics is about making good decisions with incomplete information. The VR layer heightens the sense of consequence, so students feel the weight of prioritizing (e.g., 10,000 blankets vs. water and food) while coordinating across teams. Through the first trials we have seen already better outcomes in:
- Decision quality under pressure: Students practice rapid triage, explicit prioritization criteria, and defensible justification, all skills they valued in pre-VR iterations.
- Collaboration and stakeholder engagement: Given the group-specific intel, students are compelled to cross-team coordination, mirroring cluster dynamics.
- Professional readiness: Learners translate chaotic inputs into clear, donor-facing updates and asks, strengthening the employability signals KLU is known for.
- Personal and team resilience: By working through uncertainty and time pressure in an immersive yet safe setting, students test their own and their team’s boundaries (managing stress, negotiating disagreement, and recovering from setbacks). We make this explicit in a structured debrief (after-action review) that brings up coping strategies, team norms, and “pressure playbooks.” The result is not just better choices in the moment, but greater confidence and resilience when facing real-world field conditions.
In your view, what role will immersive technologies like VR play in the future of higher education and research at KLU and beyond?
Done appropriately, it is a wonderful tool to use. We see VR as a scalable realism engine for courses where context, uncertainty, and human factors matter, like in logistics, procurement, risk, and sustainability. At KLU, it fits a broader strategy: innovative learning that travels – from campus to partner classrooms and executive training – without losing authenticity.
VR enables many possibilities, for example, creating reusable, modular scenes that different instructors can cue for different study programs. We can also see a potential for co-creating these scenes in cooperation with partnerships (NGOs and firms) to reflect real constraints, tightening the loop between academia and practice. In the research on learning, VR can help understand uncertainty, comparing decision paths with vs. without immersive stimuli.
What does the nomination for the QS Award mean to you and to the development of practice-based learning in logistics?
The nomination is a recognition that learning by doing – and doing so responsibly and realistically – is core to logistics education. For us, it validates KLU’s message: innovative formats with real-world application can raise both engagement and readiness for impact. VR is a great enhancer for education, and does not hinder problem-based teaching, but it enables a deeper learning experience. KLU is committed to keep investing in practice-based learning that prepares graduates to decide, coordinate, and communicate when it counts. This is the essence of our Operations Mindset.
