SURF Onderwijsdagen 2026

As a lecturer, how do you know what a student is actually looking at during the learning process? And how do you help students not only to look, but also to learn to see what is important?

In an increasing number of degree programmes, students are working with digital technology, sophisticated equipment and complex images. Examples include assessing retinal photographs, navigating a digital simulation of a city, or investigating a suspicious situation in virtual reality. In doing so, students must not only know how to use the equipment, but also what to look for, how to recognise normal and abnormal features, and how to adapt their actions accordingly.

In this session, you will discover how eye-tracking can help to visualise that learning process. Following an initial exploration during the SURF Education Days 2024, we developed a dual eye-tracking tool at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences’ eyeLAB that allows you to map the combined visual attention of lecturer and student. This development ties in with the question that also emerged in the SURF Story about this project: what does it mean for education if you can not only explain what a student needs to do, but also visualise where the lecturer and student are focusing their attention?

Using two pairs of eye-tracking glasses, you can see where the lecturer and student are looking whilst learning a complex visual task. The tool combines this gaze data to provide a spatial representation of eye movements and shows, in millimetres, how close their gaze points are to one another. This creates a picture of shared visual attention. To what extent are the lecturer and student looking at the same thing at the same time?

You’ll explore:

1. How dual eye-tracking visualises shared visual attention.
2. How this technology can contribute to better instruction and guidance for complex professional tasks.
3. What didactic, practical and ethical questions this raises for future-oriented education.

This session is intended for teachers, educational developers, researchers, policymakers and innovation managers who are curious about innovative technologies, such as eye-tracking, smart glasses and data-driven feedback in education. No prior technical knowledge is required. The session is primarily intended to encourage collective reflection on how we can use technology to make learning more ethical, more human, more targeted and more visible.