Having a developed culture of ethics and compliance as well as a method to audit and monitor standards is essential for every organization. An organization needs to start by developing an ethical culture that is woven into the fabric of the organization and everyday work practices from day one in order to guide employees to always choose to do the right thing. This calls for having a proper internal control system in place to regulate compliance.
One of the requirements of my Digital Education Leadership Program is to complete a Digital Ethics Audit of a school by interviewing the administrator and writing a report on the findings.
Methodology
In structuring my digital ethics audit, I started by mapping the various ISTE standards on Digital Citizen Advocate to the course objectives covering the following:
- Philosophical and theological foundations
- Digital wisdom
- Digital diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Digital wellbeing.
Based on the 4 course objectives, I then composed questions for my digital ethics audit.
Ethical Audit Questions
The following are the questions for my digital ethics audit.
| MODULES & COURSE OBJECTIVES | ETHICAL AUDIT QUESTIONS |
| Module 1: Philosophical and Theological Foundations Course Objective 3, ISTE 7a • Course Objective 3: Articulate, model, and promote strategies for addressing moral issues and character formation in digital information and technology from a theological perspective. • ISTE 7a: Inspire and encourage educators and students to use technology for civic engagement and to address challenges to improve their communities. |
• What characteristics or values are most important for the school to instill in your employees and students? • Can you share the school’s standpoint and strategy when it comes to character formation in students? • Is there a specific reason for selecting these characteristics/values? • From a practical and executional standpoint, how do you weave this strategy into the school’s operations and curriculum, especially from a digital information and technology standpoint? |
| Module 2: Digital Wisdom Course Objectives 1, 2; ISTE 7c, d • Course Objective 1: Identify, articulate, and respond to major ethical issues related to the digital realm, including fair use, plagiarism, piracy, security, and citizenship. • Course Objective 2: Articulate, model, and facilitate safe, healthy, and legal uses of digital information and technologies, including the development and curation of a digital identity. • ISTE 7c: Support educators and students to critically examine the sources of online media and identify underlying assumptions. • ISTE 7d: Empower educators, leaders and students to make informed decisions to protect their personal data and curate the digital profile they intend to reflect. |
• What are some of the key areas of ethical concerns for the school and what has been done to address these concerns? • Can you share some examples of how digital citizenship has been creatively and effectively taught in class? • How is the school equipping and empowering teachers to teach digital citizenship more effectively? • What are the school’s guidelines for governing the distinguishing of fake news from online resources based on facts? |
| Module 3: Digital Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Course Objectives 4, 5; ISTE 7a • Course Objective 4: Model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital-age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally with students, peers, parents, and the larger community. • Course Objective 5: Model and promote strategies of social justice in order to help students and teachers achieve equitable access to digital tools, resources, and technology-related promising practices. • ISTE 7a: Inspire and encourage educators and students to use technology for civic engagement and to address challenges to improve their communities. |
• What are the ways in which the school is leveraging technology to become a more digitally inclusive school? • What are some of the challenges you have encountered in trying to promote equitable access to digital tools? • How did you try to overcome these challenges and what could have been done differently? • How is the school encouraging teachers and students to use technology to improve their communities? |
| Module 4: Digital Wellbeing Course Objective 3; ISTE 7b • Course Objective 3: Articulate, model, and promote strategies for addressing moral issues and character formation in digital information and technology from a theological perspective. • ISTE 7b: Partner with educators, leaders, students and families to foster a culture of respectful online interactions and a healthy balance in their use of technology. |
• What are some of the ways the school is educating and advocating respect online and responsible technology usage among students? • How successful have these efforts been so far and what do you feel has contributed to this success? • How is the school enforcing these strategies and dealing with the consequences of non-compliance? • How can we involve families in fostering a culture of respectful online interaction? |
Digital Ethics Audit Findings
Character Development
The school places a strong emphasis on character development in its students so much so that character development has been intentionally listed as one of the three key pillars of its curriculum framework, sitting right next to knowledge and skills acquisition. There are 8 key characters identified:
- Global Citizenship
- Humility
- Integrity
- Kindness
- Leadership
- Resilience
- Respect
- Responsibility
These character values were specifically chosen to align with the national education system as well as tailored to cater to Asian family values. The curriculum developers have a system for intentionally weaving these values into every lesson. An online rubric is used to keep track of the character values covered in every lesson of every subject taught in the school.
Whole-School Approach
From a practical implementation standpoint, the school uses highly engaging classroom activities to make lessons relevant to students. The school also adopts a whole-school approach to ensure that these character values are not merely learned in theory but students get to practice and see these character values brought to life by staff members at all levels throughout the school.
Alignment with Staff Evaluation System
To achieve school-wide implementation, the school ties in the adherence to these values in its staff evaluation system. Staff members are given an index score as part of their appraisal system. A high index score would indicate a strong culture fit with high compliance with the school’s values. This gives staff members an added incentive to live out the same values the school wishes to instill in its students.
Remote Operation and Digital Agility by Design
The school recognizes the importance of embracing and leveraging technology in education and has a system in place to ensure that the academic faculty is kept up to date on the latest educational technology and leverages them in their lessons. We have a teacher who takes the lead to promote the use of new tools and technologies. However, every teacher is encouraged to share new tools they find useful and champion the usage too. Within the faculty, training sessions are organized to train teachers on how to use a new tool. This is then followed up by PLC sessions which are held weekly to encourage team members to adopt these new best practices. We find that with training sessions alone, this may not be sufficient to promote full adoption. Follow-up is required by PLC leaders to encourage and influence using soft skills to promote user adoption.
The school’s launch happened in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a difficult period to start any business but being birthed out of the pandemic also had its advantages. It meant that coping with full digital learning and instruction have been coded into the school’s DNA from the get-go. From the beginning, the entire school’s operations have been built with the capability of switching to 100% online operations. Protocols have been put in place to ensure that all staff is equipped with both the hardware and software necessary to pivot from a physical work environment to a remote one.
Documented Protocols
Being prepared for remote operations involved having clearly documented protocols on trigger events for the switch, reporting procedures, security login procedures for virtual private networks (VPN) down to communication tools to help the whole team work seamlessly during remote work. To ensure that staff members have equitable access to hardware, every staff member is issued with a laptop for portability in the event of the need to switch to remote work.
Challenges of Remote Work
Admittedly, despite all the advancements in technology, sudden switching to remote work comes with its own fair share of challenges. There were cases of new and less experienced teachers who struggled with remote instruction or staff suffering from connectivity issues at home. What the school had to deal with extended beyond simply having all the systems, tools, and protocols in place – they were dealing with a morale issue. This highlighted the need for a strong network of support system within the organization.
Established Network of Support
In a distributed and remote work situation, having an established support system with clear point persons as the first go-to person for help really aids in keeping morale up. Apart from the formal reporting line structure at work, the school also adopts a PLC (Professional Learning Community) system. The PLC is a support system with faculty members meeting weekly to share struggles in their teaching journey, review what worked well and what did not, and how members might learn from one another and sharpen one another.
On a more formal note, the faculty meets together once a month with a clear agenda of upskilling. Different faculty members take turns to instruct others in a new EdTech tool or share tips for improving teaching effectiveness. Topics may range from digital citizenship to social-emotional learning, as well as demonstrations on how to use the latest Zoom add-ons and shortcuts for smoother online lessons.
Active Parent Communication
To ensure that the learning does not end when the class ends, the school emphasizes active communication with parents. They have adopted a communication app that allows teachers to systematically send lesson notes and recaps to parents. This move ensures that families are engaged with what is being taught in school and so that parents can keep up and help students practice at home the values that were taught in school.
Audit Recommendations
During the audit, it was found that although systems and processes have been put in place, there appears to be a lag in the speed to implementation, especially for new staff members. For instance, the infrastructure has been put in place for staff members to access a Network Attached Storage (NAS) via Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. However, it was found that newer staff members only had access to the NAS drive on campus but have yet to install and activate the VPN connection to access the NAS drive from home. This remains an area to be addressed so that remote connectivity becomes an automatic part of the new staff onboarding process.
It was also found that the school currently relies on a manual in-person training method when it comes to training new staff members about the company’s values. Teacher training done among faculty members is also not recorded currently. The school might want to consider a more scalable and repeatable method of training to ensure that it can cope with the school’s growth yet adhere to ethics and compliance guidelines as it grows and scales.
