AIL 608 reshaped how I think about my responsibilities as an instructional technologist. The course paired my enthusiasm for digital innovation with a disciplined attention to fairness, accessibility, privacy, and bias, advancing my degree goal of studying the social and ethical dimensions of technology and my professional commitment to designing tools that serve all learners. Its most important effect on me individually was a permanent shift in posture: I now approach every new tool with both optimism about its potential and vigilance about its pitfalls.
The accessibility audit was the single most eye-opening activity. I had never conducted a formal accessibility audit or used automated evaluation tools before. Using an automated checker to assess the IGI Global publishing website, a platform I assumed would be well optimized because it is widely used in academic spaces, I was shocked by how low its accessibility rating was and how cluttered its layout proved to be. That experience taught me that accessibility gaps are far more widespread than I had imagined, even on reputable platforms, and it gave me a practical skill set I now use routinely. Auditing for accessibility has become a permanent part of my design and research practice, and I expect to carry it into every institutional project I take on.
The course also pushed me into the harder questions of equity and bias. Presenting and critiquing the article “Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science,” by Yadav and Heath, introduced me to the idea that bias is often embedded in technologies by design rather than by accident, what Benjamin (2019) terms the “New Jim Code,” and to frameworks such as critical race theory and design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Engaging with the authors’ “three Cs” of community, criticality, and citizenship, including the memorable example of teaching programming through cornrow-braid geometry, broadened my sense of what culturally responsive technology can look like. These ideas became personal in my ethics essay, where I reflected on testing an AI quiz generator in an African-context project and finding that it favored Western-centric examples, prompting me to think seriously about diverse data, oversight, and algorithmic bias (Dubois, 2024; Malone, 2024).
Finally, the course deepened my understanding of student data privacy as a matter of design ethics rather than mere compliance (Lachheb & Abramenka-Lachheb, 2023), and of digital equity as a justice issue requiring proactive measures such as offline alternatives and device-lending. I left AIL 608 with a concrete new skill in accessibility auditing and, more importantly, with an ethics-forward mindset that now guides how I select, design, and evaluate instructional technology.
References
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity Press.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.
Dubois, D. (2024). Paradoxes of generative AI: Both promise and threat to academic freedom. Journal of Academic Freedom, 15(1), 1–18.
Lachheb, A., & Abramenka-Lachheb, V. (2023). The role of design ethics in maintaining students’ privacy: A call to action to learning designers in higher education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 54(6), 1653–1670. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13382
Malone, B. (2024). Ethical considerations in instructional design enhanced by artificial intelligence: A systematic literature review. TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 23(4), 72–86.
