Integrating Ethics Into Instructional Design Courses and Curricula

Abstract

Ethics can be intentionally interwoven into introductory instructional design (ID) courses and ID practice without significant additional work through a reframing of foundational content and grounding of the role of an instructional designer as a designer as a “reflective practitioner.” In reviewing the literature on ethics, casting a net widely to include literature on critical approaches to technology, we identified three major themes both within instructional design and technology (IDT) and in other design- and technology-oriented disciplines such as engineering on practical approaches to ethics. Those themes center around key practices – reflection, interrogation, and design – that designers use to tackle the ethical problems that arise in practice and that are embedded in the fabric of the problem spaces we work in. In our book, Ethics and Educational Technology (Moore & Tillberg-Webb, 2023), we explored these three themes in depth and created Ethics in Practice sections for each chapter with readings, resources, and activities on common ethical problems designers confront, such as accessibility, equity, designing for diverse learners, data rights and privacy, and other considerations. Although ethics are, simply stated, a regular feature of the problems and problem spaces that IDT professionals navigate and seek to address, no model in the field addresses or integrates ethics, even a little (Moore, 2021). We would like to see that change. In this chapter, we will discuss ideas for integrating ethics into the typical instructional design course using an example from one of Heather’s courses where she has woven in ideas from our text alongside Larson & Lockee’s (2020) text, Streamlined ID. We conclude with ideas for ethics across the IDT curriculum where ethical considerations can be incorporated and the implicit ethos of a method or area of study made more explicit.