A recent project has had me exploring the ethics of the instructional design profession. As far as I can tell, there is not a professional organization that spells out the ethics. The research literature has a fair amount on information technology (IT) ethics, borrowed to a degree from business and engineering ethics. Instructional design (ID), though, still requires collaborative reflection and analysis to surface practical values of right and wrong.

Regulatory Agencies

In the absence of a professional society, the closest thing to regulatory agencies would be those supervisory organizations linked to the clientele. This would involve Section 508 rules for accessibility compliance and the ADA. This would involve intellectual property laws. And then there are the applied professional practices. It would seem helpful to understand some of the extant values of practitioners. They need to meet the guidelines for competencies and professional standards in a field.

Ethical Practices in the Field

As with most ethical standards, one of the main ones has to be primum non nocere, or avoiding doing harm. There are numerous ways to cause harm—through poor design, inaccurate information sharing, mistreating colleagues, and other types of lack of professionalism.

Another standard in the field is to build learner-centered learning—in consideration of learning styles, language needs, and other elements.

Instructional designers support a learning design by stepping lightly in the territory of subject matter experts. This means that they must show respect for the different fields and the practitioners within. They need to give their best advice but leave final decision-making to the decision-makers, who are ultimately the project primary investigators (PIs).

Because they handle privy information—about curriculum, about students, about development teams, about technologies—they also need to follow professional guidelines for protecting that information. They have responsibilities for client confidentiality.

They need to build contents with an eye towards the future—future compliance regulations, future learners, future standards, and so on. This means using clean metadata; clean pedagogical logic and practices; transferable technologies, and other elements.

Professional standards from engineering also apply. Here, people are not to work beyond their areas of competence. They hold the health, welfare and safety of the public as core concerns. They have to engage only in objective and truthful information; they have to avoid deceptive acts. They must serve as “faithful agents” of their employing companies and clients. They have to act lawfully. They must be mindful of the reputation of their field and their company. They must proceed with a sense of honor.

Universal principles include those of honesty and trustworthiness, a valuing of human life and welfare, respect for fair play, professional competence, and candor.

Methods for Ethical Reasoning

Various sources address methods for ethical reasoning in the field. These models surface the facts of the case and the various ethical values that may be in conflict.

Various researchers suggest various models for ethical development.

Some Resources

The Association for Educational Communications and Technology’s “Code of Professional Ethics” offers some fine insights: http://www.aect.org/About/Ethics.asp.

Your Lived Professional Values?

This blog entry actually is a long invitation for people to share their concepts of ethical approaches to instructional design. What are critical core values, and why are these important? What interesting cases have you encountered that tested your mettle?