A canvas for the ethical design of learning experiences with digital tools

The use of digital tools has drastically increased in engineering education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These tools generate important ethical issues, particularly regarding privacy and fairness. However, very few teacher training programs address those topics, which means that teachers are often left to figure out by themselves how to address these issues when they want (or have) to use digital tools in their teaching. This is all the more an issue that staggering developments in digital technology, in particular artificial intelligence, create new ethical challenges for engineers and engineering educators.

This workshop seeks to fill this gap by proposing a pragmatic approach to the ethical design of learning experiences with digital tools, in the form of a visual thinking guide called a “canvas”. Originally developed for the humanitarian context, our canvas implements a “principled approach” to analysis and design: central to the canvas is a set of three ethical principles (user empowerment, fairness and user privacy) that we use as a lens to examine risks and mitigation options when a specific digital tool is used in or designed for a specific teaching or learning context.

After an interactive introduction of the ethical challenges related to digital tools, participants will practice using the canvas by analysing collaboratively a real learning scenario with well-established existing technologies (e.g. moodle, Google docs, DeepL). Then, by drawing a parallel between learning experience design and technology design, we will discuss with participants how this canvas could be used more generally as a framework for the socially responsible design of digital tools. Applied and hands-on, this workshop should help participants to develop a practical understanding of the specific ethical issues related to the use of digital tools in teaching and to integrate ethical reflection into design processes when digital technology is involved.

Speaker: Cécile Hardebolle
Collaborators on the project: Patrick Jermann, Roland Tormey, Jessica Dehler Zufferey (EPFL, Switzerland), Adrian Holzer, Pascal Ferber (UniNe, Switzerland) and Katrin Bentel, Urs Brändle, Gerd Kortemeyer (ETHZ, Switzerland)

Tuesday, December 6th, 15h-16h30 CET