The role of design ethics in maintaining students' privacy

A call to action to learning designers in higher education

Bibliographic Data

ID21297141
AuthorsAhmed Lachheb (0000-0003-4046-6385, The Center for Academic Innovation The University of Michigan Ann Arbor Michigan USA, corresponding author), Victoria Abramenka‐Lachheb (0000-0003-3709-7240, The University of Michigan Ann Arbor Michigan USA), Stephanie Moore (0000-0001-5545-1894, Organization, Information, and Learning Sciences The University of New Mexico Albuquerque New Mexico USA), Colin M Gray (0000-0002-7307-1550, Informatics Indiana University Bloomington Indiana USA)
Year2023
Volume54
Issue6
Pages1653-1670
Publication date2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Educational Technology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1013 • E-ISSN: 1467-8535
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/bjet.13382
OpenAlexW4386220273
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited33

Maintaining students' privacy in higher education, an integral aspect of learning design and technology integration, is not only a matter of policy and law but also a matter of design ethics. Similar to faculty educators, learning designers in higher education play a vital role in maintaining students' privacy by designing learning experiences that rely on online technology integration. Like other professional designers, they need to care for the humans they design for by not producing designs that infringe on their privacy, thus, not causing harm. Recognizing that widely used instructional design models are silent on the topic and do not address ethical considerations such as privacy, we focus this paper on how design ethics can be leveraged by learning designers in higher education in a practical manner, illustrated through authentic examples. We highlight where the ethical responsibility of learning designers comes into the foreground when maintaining students' privacy and well‐being, especially in online settings. We outline an existing ethical decision‐making framework and show how learning designers can use it as a call to action to protect the students they design for, strengthening their ethical design capacity. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Existing codes of ethical standards from well‐known learning design organizations call upon learning designers to protect students' privacy without clear guidance on how to do so. Design ethics within learning design is often discussed in abstract ways with principles that are difficult to apply. Most, if not all, design models that learning design professionals have learned are either silent on design ethics and/or do not consider ethics as a valid dimension, thus, making design ethics mostly excluded from learning design graduate programs. Practical means for engaging in ethical design practice are scarce in the field. What this paper adds A call for learning designers in higher education to maintain and protect students' privacy and well‐being, strengthening their ethical design capacity. A demonstration of how to use a practical ethical decision‐making framework as a designerly tool in designing for learning to maintain and protect students' privacy and well‐being. Authentic examples—in the form of vignettes—of ethical dilemmas/issues that learning designers in higher education could face, focused on students' privacy. Methods—using a practical ethical decision‐making framework—for learning design professionals in higher education, grounded in the philosophy of designers as the guarantors of designs, to be employed to detect situations where students' privacy and best interests are at risk. A demonstration of how learning designers could make stellar design decisions in service to the students they design for and not to the priorities of other design stakeholders. Implications for practice and/or policy Higher education programs/institutions that prepare/employ learning designers ought to treat the topics of the designer's responsibility and design ethics more explicitly and practically as one of the means to maintain and protect students' privacy, in addition to law and policies. Learning designers in higher education ought to hold a powerful position in their professional practice to maintain and protect students' privacy and well‐being, as an important aspect of their ethical design responsibilities. Learning designers in higher education ought to adopt a design thinking mindset in order to protect students' privacy by (1) challenging ideas and assumptions regarding technology integration in general and (2) detecting what is known in User Experience (UX) design as “dark patterns” in online course design.

Action (physics) · Business · Call to action · Engineering ethics · Harm · Higher education · Information privacy · Instructional design · Internet privacy · Knowledge management · Multimedia · Political science · Privacy by Design · Computer Science · Digital Education and Society · Engineering · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Ethics in Business and Education · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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