id5000-wk7

Student’s Name

Course

Superviso

1. Reasons for choosing the leader

In this assignment, I choose to contact Kelly Garber, an L & D professional with experience in instructional design, facilitation coaching, e-learning, persistent learning and blended solutions. Several reasons led to the selection of this leader. One of the major reasons is my area of inquiry in ID. I looked forward to understanding the most crucial legal, ethical and political issues that affect ID in the field of development of websites and learning portals.

Therefore, I carried out an online search for the most active and popular professionals on Twitter to get these responses. Garber was the best option because despite being a professional in the field of Instructional Design, he also has a wealth of knowledge in e-learning which makes him the best choice.

Leader’s response concerning ethical, legal and political issues in ID

After inquiring from Garber about the impact of ethical, legal or political issues in ID that affects websites and learning portals, he highlighted several issues that were pertinent in this area. The first issue was a legal issue concerning property rights. In this case, ID in websites and learning portals should not be viewed as just being constituted of only hardware and software. Instead, it also comprises of property rights that need to be considered.

The first aspect of property rights that ought to be considered is the administrative property. It is essential to realize that administrators play a key role in the caring and preservation of education welfare. However, this cannot be complete without realizing the responsibility they have for respecting the needs of other stakeholders in the field of education. Various stakeholders like teachers, students and parents have the right to inform the administrators of the patterns in educational technology which they find inappropriate. They also have the right to inform the educators concerning areas that they find the policies as inadequate. To perform such tasks, the administrators must be aware of the property rights belonging to the students and teachers.

First, teachers are both stewards and owners of property rights. For instance, teachers come up with their instructional devices and at the same time, take care of other items such as the performance records for students. In their practices, the teachers have to negotiate the nature of various property rights relationships, depending on their professional perspective. This may compel the teachers to encourage their students to develop stronger ownership tendencies, especially in lessons that apply instructional technology.

On the other hand, the administrators must also recognize that the students also have some intellectual property. This is especially in cases where students bring their ideas into the classroom. This is, however, neutralized by K-12 settings which consequently tailor student's ideas in ways that fit them into social, cultural norms. This, therefore, makes the students temporary proponents of the ideas they bring into the classroom.

Therefore, an instructional design that is ethically sensitive has to respect the intellectual property which includes ownership ideas. This includes the creation of a collaborative environment that supports such a sense of ownership and grants the owners of the property rights some level of control.

The other important area is the issue of freedom of speech. This in ID, stands for instructional freedom. In this case, there exists a conflict of interest between the learning technology administrators and the teachers. This is because the vendors of e-learning technology seek to impose some certain instructional policies on the teachers while the teachers resist these policies as they seek to retain their autonomy.

The last issue that Garber highlighted was the issue of privacy and accessibility in ID. Website development and development of student portals are affected by privacy and accessibility issues. This is because the implemented system must safeguard any personal information preserved in the portals by students and teachers. This also pertains the aspect of security. This is teaching applies where teachers warn students against looking at other student's paper, especially assessment papers.

The issue of accessibility is also a sensitive issue. This is because the inequitable distribution of technological resources in learning represents the existence of a digital divide. Therefore, as administrators make allocation decisions, they have to consider the issue of accessibility. As they make accessibility decisions, the administrators have to keep in mind other issues such as security and the issue of intellectual property.

The concerns outlined by Garber are similar to those found in other scholarly resources. This is because most of these sources address the issue of privacy and property rights as the most crucial ethical and legal issues that need to be addressed (Lucey, 2009). Other sources adopt a general perspective of these issues and classify them as political factors that influence instructional design (Reiser, 2012). This is because political factors affect the formulation of learning policies as well as privacy and property rights.

Based on the issues observed by Garber as well as those from the scholarly sources, it is evident that the main issues that affect ID in the field of websites and learning portals are privacy and accessibility issues as well as property rights. Therefore, administrators and designers must give priority to such issues.

Appendix

References

Lucey, T. A., & Grant, M. M. (2009). Ethical issues in instructional technology: An exploratory framework. Multicultural Education & Technology Journal, 3(3), 196-212.

Reiser, R. A., & Dempsey, J. V. (Eds.). (2012). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Boston, MA: Pearson.