Value-Informed Innovation: Integrating Value-Sensitive Design and Evidence-Informed Practice in Education

Abstract

Digital innovation in education – as in any other sector – is not only about developing and implementing novel ideas, but also about having these ideas effectively used as well as widely accepted and adopted, so that many students can benefit from innovations improving education. Effectiveness, transferability and scalability cannot be added afterwards; it must be integrated from the start in the design, development and implementation processes, as is proposed in the movement towards evidenceinformed practice (EIP). The impact an educational innovation has on the values of various stakeholders is often overlooked. Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is an approach to integrate values in technological design. In this paper we discuss how EIP and VSD may be combined into an integrated approach to digital innovation in education, which we call value-informed innovation. This approach not only considers educational effectiveness, but also incorporates the innovation’s impact on human values, its scalability and transferability to other contexts. We illustrate the integrated approach with an example case of an educational innovation involving digital peer feedback.

Ethical reasoning methods for ICT: the technical report

“…To propose the Ethical Matrix in Digital Innovation [61], van der Stappen builds upon the Ethical Matrix, which aims at lowering the threshold for non-ethicists to participate in the ethical evaluation of biotechnological innovations in agriculture and food production [41], and which has been extensively been validated [42] and adapted to other domains (e.g. waste management [30]).…”

“…This is done by organising design review workshops where the participants identify positive, neutral, and negative impacts that the ICT has on the values and stakeholders, writing a short explanation in the corresponding matrix cells and, optionally colouring the cells with green, white or red background, respectively. The method utility has been tested in the context of two projects developing a health check app and an online internship coaching tool [61], and also during the redesign of an online exam proctoring tool [62]. The results show that it allows identifying relevant impacts of the ICT on stakeholder values and inform the engineering of requirements and design alternatives that incorporate counter-measure for the negative impacts.…”

“…Example of an Ethical Matrix for a health check app to be used within a learning environment (from[61])…”