Mobiles for TEQSA Regulatory Course Compliance

Greetings from mLearn 2016  at UTS in Sydney, where Anthony Chung from mobileLearning gave one of the more practical and less academic (in a good way) sessions on "How does a Mobile Platform Address TEQSA and Other Regulatory Compliance for Online Courses?". Anthony went through some of the TEQSA requirements and how these could be facilitated with mobile devices. What was interesting about mobileLearning's approach is that they provide  mobile interface to the institution's native educational applications, rather than replace them. The idea is to make it easier for students and staff to do what is educationally useful. One example is to encourage the student to engage with the learning. This can be difficult where a Learning Management System (LMS) design for static desktop pages is used. The mobile interface can make it easier to access the materials and interact.

Other sessions at the conference took a different approach, arguing that students spend their time in social media websites so the learning needs to happen in those social media applications. I have concerns as to the privacy and distractions for the student, as well as the difficulty to continually adapting the learning materials for whatever is the current social media platform. It would be possible to build a LMS interface to social media, and a default mobile interface outside the platform, but there would still be a very high privacy risk due to the social media interface.