Umera Imtinan

The role of information systems (IS) in sustainability has increased, and so has the demand for sustainability skills and competencies as organisations and people pursue sustainable ways of operating and living for the planet, the plants, the people, and the profit. Educational institutions are critical in enabling sustainable development as they provide learning environments for sustainability education (SE). Universities worldwide are integrating SE into curricula to enable learners to develop essential sustainability competencies for various industries.

The IS curricula need a clear agenda for integrating SE to develop the essential skills and competencies for sustainable design and use of IS. Yet, the IS discipline lays the foundation for rethinking diverse information technologies (IT) in organisations and the everyday lives of individuals and groups.

We propose a critical investigation of how IS academics integrate SE into the current IS curricula. The study will reveal how the integrations are mapped to the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), the economic, social and governance (ESG) framework, and the external curricular bodies such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The investigation will reveal the targeted sustainability competencies essential for IS practice. The anticipated outcomes are intended to guide the integration of SE in IS curricula in universities and develop critical sustainability competencies for enduring IS practice.

Mobile learning offers learning opportunities to learners without the limitations of time and space. Mobile learning has introduced a number of flexible options to the learners across disciplines and at different educational levels. However, designing mobile learning content is an equally challenging task for the instructional designers. Currently, mobile learning researchers are trying to determine a set of mobile learning characteristics to inform mobile learning design. Besides conforming to the pedagogical requirements, mobile learning instructional designers are also considering the nature of learning activities to engage learners with miniature mobile devices. Similarly, there are a number of mobile learning characteristics which are crucial to mobile learning design in order to harness the power and affordances of mobile devices as well as maintaining the learning element as the main focus. This paper is an attempt to point out common mobile learning characteristics as they appear in key mobile learning conceptualizations, models and frameworks in the literature. These characteristics may be useful for future researchers to inform the mobile learning design process as well as mobile learning conceptualizations.

Human resource management and development in education involves building professional skills in all the stakeholders such as students, teachers and administrators on regular basis. This paper focuses on main areas of human resource management in Education for a developing country like Pakistan. Firstly, it will discuss the human resource management in the process of change in an educational institution. Second area is management of conflict among the people working in an institution. Third area of focus is the management of human resource by distributive leadership. The role of educational ICTs in management and development of human resource in education has been identified as another substantially important factor. Finally, the importance of practice based educational environment has been discussed. All of the above discussed themes are interconnected. Hence, all of them provide a sound basis for good governance, for education providers, human resource management and development in the right direction.

Mobile learning involves using mobile devices as learning tools and accessing learning resources outside an academic institution's premises to allow the learning process to be more dynamic, flexible and collaborative; it has been theorised, applied and trialed mainly in the USA, UK, Europe and Australia. Trials and pilots in developed countries have shown encouraging results and acceptance of mobile learning by teachers and students in many universities which indicates great potential for the researchers to take further initiatives in mobile learning. In spite of the advancement in mobile technologies, developing countries like Pakistan have not received the attention of researchers with respect to experimentation and conceptualisation of mobile learning.Thus, the current research aims the key stakeholders in universities to experiment with features of mobile learning in teaching and learning for the future. Futhermore, the Pakistani universities could use the proposed mobile learning conceptual model as a guideline to upgrade their ICTs to enrich the existing learning paradigms with the flexibility and interactivity offered by mobile learning. At a further stage of the research, the proposed mobile learning conceptual model will be enriched by collecting data through focus groups of students and teachers in universities followed by individual interviews with key stakeholders in selected universities in Pakistan.

Usability in mobile devices, for learning, has drawn researchers’ attention since the term mobile learning has been coined in teaching and learning arenas. Current mobile devices in the market have ignored the design and styles for learning purposes. Although mobile devices have some features for games purposes, there are other important usability characteristics that ought to be considered to support learning. Therefore, mobile learning researchers need to investigate the learning options with the available capabilities of mobile devices. Students in developing countries reported more problems related to usability based on their individual experiences dealing with mobile devices for learning purposes. This paper aims to identify the implications of usability in mobile devices for learning based on research conducted in Pakistan.