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Rising to the occasion: Exploring the changing emphasis on educational design during COVID-19

With the advent of COVID-19, the majority of universities in Australasia have had to adjust quickly to provide the bulk of their learning and teaching activities online. To a great extent this involved learning/educational designers (and titles similar to this) needing to provide a range of tasks (some new) associated with supporting many teaching staff unfamiliar with teaching online. In some cases, this has meant a change in role, while for others it was transitioning to new and higher levels of responsibility. Regardless, the emotional impact of this should not be understated, or at least should understood. This paper explores these concepts based on the feedback from 90 educational designers, mainly from the Australasian higher education sector. It presents details of the results of a semi-structured qualitative study of those working in the field of educational design at universities. These designers were asked to consider how COVID-19 has impacted the ways in which they undertook their work, the types of issues they are dealing with, and the solutions they were proposing and contributing. Their accounts document the changing nature of their roles and their emotions in the face of potentially unalterable changes.