Challenge 1: Recognize, respect, and comply with organizational constraints.
Criteria for successful completion of this challenge: Evidence of following a code of ethics including giving credit to others’ ideas (such as proper use of citations) –or— demonstration of complying with constraints (budget issues, organizational rules or regulations, available technology, student demographics, etc.).
Reflection must address: How your evidence demonstrates complying with organizational constraints. Examples: Proper use of citations in papers, discussion, publications; plagiarism certificate, the LDT honor code, other evidence (design, performance, workplace, educational, or other) demonstrating proper credit to other authors.
Artifact
Reflection
For the competency, “recognize, respect, and comply with organizational constraints, and comply with organizational and professional codes of ethics,” I have selected my Completed Plagiarism Certificate as an artifact. The Certificate is intended for Master’s and Doctoral students and conducted by Indiana University Bloomington School of Education to ensure I have correctly answered 9 out of 10 questions regarding the adherence to a plagiarism code of ethics. The plagiarism certificate indicates that I understand and respect the academic constraints set by an academic institution and that I am aware of what constitutes plagiarism and the importance of avoiding it, thus complying with the organization’s rules.
Instructional designers work within the ethical and organizational confines of the existing system they are trying to improve with training. The process of achieving this certificate has further allowed me as a professional to recognize and respect organizational constraints. I have studied and analyzed hundreds of citation example problems to be ready for the certification test and have used this information to demonstrate proper citations in my own work. By completing this assessment, I have demonstrated my ability to comply with the organizational constraints of Purdue and other institutions to maintain academic honesty throughout my tenure and beyond.
With many years of experience working and training in corporations like Ford Motor Company, I have been exposed to environments with stringent ethical standards and organizational constraints. Looking back and through the experience of this exercise I can attest the training could have been even more improved with proper citations to help support follow-through activities. The experience of this artifact has given me a solid understanding of the importance of adhering to rules and policies within a professional setting. The Plagiarism Certificate, while academically focused, reflects my broader understanding of the necessity to follow established guidelines and ethical standards. My corporate experience has helped to hone my understanding of the importance of adhering to ethical and legal guidelines, and this parallels with the need to understand and avoid plagiarism in academic work. At Ford, I participated in sales training meetings that were originally conducted with minimal formal citations and relied heavily on word-of-mouth knowledge transfer. Recognizing and respecting the need for structured and cited training materials would have improved the effectiveness and credibility of these sessions. Implementing formal documentation and adherence to academic guidelines may have ensured even more consistency and accuracy within the training content, which in turn would have led to better outcomes in the performance context for salespeople and managers alike.
The Plagiarism Certificate is an excellent example of demonstrating these competencies because it proves my ability to recognize organizational constraints like academic policies and adhere to professional codes of ethics. Learning how to avoid plagiarism in this context has allowed me to accurately source materials in my work and has taught me best practices for citations. I am now more adept at looking at the bigger picture to acknowledge the contributions of others, and through implementation of this process I help foster a culture of respect and collaboration. The knowledge of how to implement proper citation practices is essential in my ability for creating trustworthy and reliable educational materials. Throughout my career, I will conduct more thorough research with accurate references and will have expert strategies to grow this knowledge through continuous learning. Carbery & Leahy point to the importance of using a rubric to analyze the degree and uses of citations in a graduate level library science class as being valuable in determining the instructional design of future programs stating, “Challenging our assumption…librarians were able to shift and refocus…to be less concerned with finding sources, and more focused on evaluating and synthesizing sources.” (Carbery & Leahy 2015 pg. 85) These findings ring true especially in this politically charged environment of 2024 where there are many more implications designers need to consider when examining how sources are evaluated and synthesized within the final artifacts.
Upon diving deeper into this topic in respect to citations in ID work to help discover trends I discovered how the authors of the 2008 article Citations as a Key to Identity in the Field of Instructional Design and Technology described their research stating, “The field continues to have an enduring interest in emerging technologies and from the list of highly cited works we find a balance between application of emerging technologies to real world instructional situations and theoretical work on topics of interest within emerging technologies.” (Carr-Chellman et al. 2008, pg. 68) In the current 2024 environment, I can identify the need to further integrate research between theory and emerging technology. Instructional designers are grappling with the increased reliance on AI (Artificial Intelligence) for learners and how its application to real-world workflows, through immediate and conversational AI feedback loops, has been forever changed. In addition to having proper ethical standards from codes of conduct when sourcing materials, IDs may have to turn to the motivational theory SDT (Self Determination Theory) to allow for an intrinsic commitment to ethical citation practices. With the deluge of new tech and conversational Chat GPTs the instructional designer will have to inevitably be driven the desire to maintain integrity and contribute to the academic community in an age where the lines between organizational “codes of ethics” become increasingly more blurred between what is AI created and what is human created, and who or what to give credit to with proper citations.
Carbery, Alan, and Sean Leahy. “Evidence-Based Instruction: Assessing Student Work Using Rubrics and Citation Analysis to Inform Instructional Design.” Journal of Information Literacy, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.11645/9.1.1980.
Citations as a Key to Identity in the Field of Instructional Design Technology. TECHTRENDS TECH TRENDS 52, 64–69 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-008-0157-6