Mobile devices and a vast array of accompanying applications offer significant affordances to create, consume, share, collaborate and communicate—affordances that could be easily leveraged to facilitate meaningful learning. A positive disruption arising from COVID-19 that aligns with the affordances of mobile learning is the uncoupling of time and space in the learning process. Traditionally formal learning is a process that is predominately viewed as an experience that is ‘timetabled’— scheduled to eventuate at a ‘place’—lecture or a tutorial (or similar) in a room or lecture theatre. In this concise paper, an ecology of resources is discussed along with guiding principles for designing and facilitating uncoupled authentic and student-determined learning post the emergency remote teaching phase.

This symposium will explore the opportunities, function and context of professional standards, competencies and frameworks that apply to Learning Designer roles in Higher Education. We seek to sharpen the focus and remove some ambiguity around Learning Designer roles. In the symposium, participants will consider the challenges, barriers, as well as the opportunities that professional standards for learning designers may afford, through examining the role from a professional identity lens. The symposium is designed to be an active forum where participants will discuss and contemplate what an Australian standard for Learning Designers may look like.

Learning Designers are increasingly employed in universities to support institutional digital and pedagogical transformation agendas, which are posited to better meet the diverse and changing needs of a heterogeneous student body. Despite broad commitment to investing in these roles, surprisingly little is known about what learning designers in higher education actually do in practice. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a scoping review that thematically analysed pertinent literature, to explore what is currently espoused about the professional identity of learning designers in higher education. The review identified 40 indicators of the knowledge, skills and attributes required of learning designers in the higher education sector. This research provides valuable insights for both individuals and institutions. The findings provide universities with an evidence-informed perspective of the learning designer, including an account of the unique capabilities of learning designers as transformative change agents to student learning. For individual learning designers the findings provide a comprehensive list of indicators to benchmark role responsibilities against, and a framework through which professional identity can be comprehended.