Yael Kidron is the director of Character Education at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.
Educational technology is affecting not only pedagogy in schools—but it redefines teacher-student and family-school relationships, the privacy of student data, and goal setting in education. To protect young consumers and their families and schools, we want ethical thinking to be part of every phase of the design process. Events that connect professionals who care about innovative educational technology have the opportunity and the power to foster ethical design in the next generation of innovators. Here is an example from a recent exciting event managed by the international organization, Techstars.
In a recent San Jose-based Startup Weekend Education event, eleven teams participated in a weekend-long competition in San Jose. Each team included instructional designers, web developers, and teachers. The teams worked closely with coaches who represented different areas of expertise in education. Each of the eleven teams had a different and unique idea. Collectively, the teams covered age ranges 5 through 25 years; learning in school and at home; academic and life skills instruction; and, learning, planning, coordinating, and communicating tools.
The 54-hour event focused on the ideation phase of product design – generating ideas through brainstorming, diagramming, and analyzing ideas through models, mockups, and demos. The teams needed to attend to different issues in business development starting with an understanding of the target market and ending with a financial sustainability plan.
Most teams also grappled with ethical issues. Here are some examples of the questions raised: How will app developers ensure stereotype-free text and visual messages? How will they protect student privacy? What can prevent chats among learners from escalating into cyberbullying? How can paid services create inequality? To what extent might communications apps impede rather than facilitate the flow of information from the district office to schools and families? How can online games protect students from exposure to online advertising?
At the end of the event, the teams pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. The three winners of the events were:
- Nestling
Connecting childcare providers and parents to streamline communication and deliver developmentally sound recommendations - SPEDule
A solution to special education teachers’ scheduling woes and case management loads - Natively
Supporting English language learners in acquiring English idioms and “real talk” through the use of voice recognition and popular video clips.
According to one of the event organizers, Adnan Pirzada, the primary purpose of the event is to bring together professionals from different fields. “The competitive side of it pushes people to consult with others, validate ideas, and do their research. They know that the judges will look critically at their ideas.” He explained.
Getting together energetic people with different areas of expertise is the secret to success. “We would not call it a failure if none of the teams moved further with their ideas after Startup Weekend. Perhaps they will pursue a different idea,” Pirzada noted. “ClassDojo, the communication app for the classroom started this way. The team met for the first time in a Startup Weekend. They scrapped the original idea from the Startup Weekend and started a new one.”
Startup Weekend’s thinking about the support that design pioneers should receive may be heading in the right direction. As educational technology continues to flourish, it is essential that developers integrate ethics and virtues in early phases of the design process. Ex post facto examination of unintended “side-effects” of the technology solution are harder to fix and may have already caused some harm to consumers. Initiatives such as Startup Weekend can make ethical design an explicit step and a criterion for judging the strength of an educational technology product.