This paper describes the development and evaluation of an educational simulation that supports collaborative learning of ethical decision-making (EDM). This collaboration-based simulation serves as the core component of an information ethics course. Twenty-two graduate students used the simulation during the second half of a semester-long course. Twenty of the twentytwo students (91%) completed a written survey describing their experiences with the simulation as well as the course as a whole. The research question is: What did students learn from using the simulation as part of this course? Salient themes that emerged from the analysis included that students gained a greater understanding of the following: 1) their own EDM, 2) the EDM of others, 3) the importance of EDM; 4) the complexity of EDM, and 5) how EDM can be applied to their careers and everyday lives. Overall, using the simulation proved to be an effective collaborative learning experience for students.
The objective of this research was to investigate the use of decision aid technologies to support ethical problem solving. The decision aid developed for the exploratory study described in this paper was web-based and provided content that summarized and simplified much of moral philosophy (i.e. normative ethical theory) [3,5,11,13,18,24,26]. The ethical dilemma was posed in case format.Participants were asked to write, and revise as necessary, a solution to the case. The decision aid was developed to address five constructs in the research model: (1) Perceived Ethical Problem, (2) Perceived Alternatives, (3) Deontological Evaluation, (4) Teleological Evaluation, and (5) an Ethic of Care. Results from analysis showed that participants that used the decision aid identified the case's main issue, personal information privacy, more frequently than participants that did not use the decision aid. Individuals with support of the decision aid discussed the need to respect equal individual rights more often. Mixed results were found concerning use of other concepts from moral philosophy. An analysis technique was used that generated and statistically analyzed graphs that described how users navigated through decision problems. First, the participants' movements were captured as they went from page to page. These data were then used to construct depth-first-search trees (a particular type of graph). Characteristics of these trees were compared statistically, and the results showed no difference in the way control or treatment users navigated. Web-based ethical decision aids can be built and used, and can improve the solutions developed by students solving cases in a laboratory environment.
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