2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

2024 ASEE - Faculty Development Division: WIP Proposal
WIP: Developing a framework for ethical integration of technology in instruction

This work-in-progress paper describes a proposal for the development of a framework for ethical integration of technology in their classrooms.

In a university setting where the adoption of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seems like a foregone conclusion, faculty have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm, resignation, and denial. And as with most issues of pedagogy, there is lively disagreement among instructors about whether and how to use LLMs with their students. Despite such uncertainties, however, there has been remarkably swift integration of LLMs in higher education.

Lagging behind such adoption is a serious discussion of ethical concerns and questions about LLMs; this failure may stem in part from instructors’ reluctance to voice concerns in the face of institutional enthusiasm and pressure to “fully embrace” LLMs or risk being labeled a “dinosaur.” The absence of such discussions risks ignoring significant questions about what these tools mean for the valuation of instructors' labor and the lack of evidence-based research on the impact of these tools on learning and the well-being of students and instructors [1][6]. Additionally, there are ethical concerns about LLM technology itself, as it is built from the scraping of creative work without writers' knowledge or consent and the labor of low-wage workers who experience trauma from viewing harmful content while labeling data. LLMs' environmental impacts, as well as the lack of transparency and understanding (even by experts) of how LLMs work also warrant examination.

Such ethical concerns, far from being afterthoughts, are central to any responsible and reasoned examination of LLMs or any other classroom technology, as there is little value to any tool, no matter how dazzling, that does not promote human and planetary flourishing. As stated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems,

"by creating autonomous and intelligent systems that explicitly honor inalienable human rights and the beneficial values of their users, we can prioritize the increase of human well-being as our metric for progress in the algorithmic age."

Instructors considering various technologies for their classrooms may find a framework for analyzing the ethics of classroom technology to be useful for more deliberate decision-making that aligns with their responsibilities to society, their students, and themselves. Crafted from the fields of technology ethics, ethical pedagogy, information literacy, educator ethics, and environmental ethics, a draft framework will be presented and explained. The paper will also present initial qualitative findings regarding feedback collected from various groups of educators in higher education, along with how they modified and personalized the framework for their own departments or institutions. Such information can provide important insights as to how educators consider and apply ethical principles to their decisions regarding classroom technologies.

The preferred presentation mode for this paper is a lightning talk.