Sub-Badge 4: Ethical, Legal & Political Implications of Design

Challenge 1: Comply with organizational and professional codes of ethics.

Criteria for successful completion of this challenge: Evidence of following a professional code of ethics. Reflection must address: How following a code of ethics affects your decision-making process in instructional design or other aspects of your work.

Reflection must address: How your evidence demonstrates complying with organizational constraints.

Artifact

Certificate of Completion of CITI Program Course “Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training – Basic Course – For Faculty, Postdoctoral, and Graduate Students.”

Reflection

I have selected my Certificate of Completion of the CITI Program Course "Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training – Basic Course – For Faculty, Postdoctoral, and Graduate Students" as the artifact to demonstrate how I aim to comply with organizational and professional code of ethics in the practice of instructional design. I selected this artifact because the RCR Training touches on important topics that are fundamental to following a professional code of ethics in the workplace.

Complying with an organizational and professional code of ethics is important because instructional designers working in any organization are daily faced with multiple decisions. Such decisions can be as fundamental as whether developing a training module is required to solve a certain problem or can the issue be solved through non-training interventions. There are many such ethical decision points. It is necessary to have a framework in place to guide designers towards correct decision making in such scenarios. The RCR Certification contains training modules that help showcase awareness in areas such as plagiarism, research misconduct, authorship, conflict of interest and many more.

I previously had limited knowledge about topics such as avoiding plagiarism, but I learnt a lot more through this certification about challenges and scenarios that arise in research. While developing my design portfolio and associated projects (prior to the Graduate program), I had learnt about the importance of correctly providing credit for resources taken from other websites, such as graphics, images, and UDL resources. While earning the RCR certification, I learnt a lot more about concepts such as self-plagiarism, and how even using one's own work without proper citations can create problems. For example, when using my previous portfolio work towards assignments in the Graduate program, I now knew to ask if this was allowed, learnt more about the Work Verification Form, and how to authenticate my work.

Overall, I believe the RCR Certificate strongly demonstrates competency in complying with professional code of ethics at the workplace. Moving forward, I will be much more aware of issues surrounding authorship, data management, reproducibility of results, research misconduct and so on. With such knowledge, I will be more aware and mindful when situations in these areas arise. I will be able to apply what I learnt in the RCR training to resolve such situations. One of the ays I will implement my learning in the future is in all academic papers, I will provide appropriate citations in the correct format (APA or others) and add specific references to various sources in the Bibliography section.