Navigating Ethical Challenges in AI for Instructional Design: Strategies and Solutions

• In Event: Confronting Complex Educational Challenges in Instructional Design and Technology Research and Practice

Abstract

Stephanie has published extensively on ethics and instructional design & technology (IDT), including a recent book, Ethics and Educational Technology and a forthcoming edited book on Applied Ethics for Instructional Design and Technology. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computing in Higher Education and leading a special issue on “The Research We Need” with Jill Stefaniak and Tom Reeves. For that SI, she is working on a piece on “grand challenges” and has given a keynote on this, leading a similar activity as proposed here. She has also written on adult literacy and learner mental health as important global problems requiring coordinated research and development efforts.

Her interests focus on how designers and practitioners navigate ethical issues that arise in practice and alongside technologies, especially how they use creative problem solving and strategies of synthesis, not just analysis, in not only identifying or naming ethical issues but also in devising practical solutions. For this panel, Stephanie will help facilitate the panel discussion and the proposed activity and contribute thoughts on how to move discourse on ethics of AI past the phase of naming and towards a process of devising solutions, sharing examples of strategies that designers use from her recent research on how designers approach ethics through design and synthesis. Drawing on two recent collections of scholarship on ethics in instructional design that she co-lead or co-edited, Stephanie’s current research project analyzes 16 separate cases where designers were prompted to unpack the ethical dimensions of a given project and discuss key decision points and their design processes specific to ethical considerations. Several themes illuminate how instructional designers and technologists identify ethical issues and what strategies they use at different stages of design. Across the cases are themes of stakeholder involvement with end users and learners as strategies for uncovering priority concerns and considerations. Additionally, in many cases, designers did not work in isolation but instead worked with small teams or a close team of advisors or consultants who acted as sounding boards for identifying ethical issues, reframing them as design constraints or parameters, and brainstorming possible solutions. A few cases also introduced novel design strategies as tools for ethics and learning design. Two teams described the use of wrong theory protocol (Svihla & Kachelmeier, 2020) as a specific design strategy that appears to prompt more empathetic and creative design ideas. And several designers explored the use of speculative design as a form of critical design that also prompts future visioning on topics like AI. Finally, problem framing also emerged as a strategy that can be used at the front-end of design to frame ethical considerations into the design and decision making process.

Drawing on insights from this research as well as her scholarship on ethics over the years, Stephanie’s portion of this symposium will explore how ethical problems are practical problems and present the overarching idea of “grand challenges” along with some examples such as adult literacy and online learner mental health.

Author

• Stephanie Moore, University of New Mexico