Intended Audience

The Ethics & Morality Web site has been designed for a twelfth grade, secondary school social sciences curriculum, with the understanding that it would also be ideal for college-level use and beyond. However, these nine affiliated WebQuests could be used in other mature, secondary school teaching-learning environments with the instructor's discretion and supervision. This on-line curriculum is best suited for small classes and group collaboration, rather than individual work. Students will need to be familiar with the Internet and on-line research. There is no particular ethics text to accompany this instructional design model.

Objectives of the Web Site

Students will engage in this collaborative, Web-enhanced teaching-learning environment in order to further their individual and collective understanding of particular applied ethical topics pervading modern American society. Through collaborative, anchored inquiry, students will learn to effectively research, discuss, listen, debate, collaborate, reflect, write, and express their viewpoints in a variety of media on nine different ethical topics: capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, genetic engineering, affirmative action, gay rights, gun control, anabolic steroid use, and Internet censorship. Students will also be exposed to a variety of teaching and learning styles. Some pedagogical matrices will be familiar to students, others will perhaps be new. Various instructional design models and goals are at the heart of this on-line curriculum, and these will be discussed below.

Recommendations for Integrating this Web Site into a Curriculum

While designed to integrate into an advanced secondary school social sciences curriculum, these collective WebQuests are, effectively, an on-line curriculum of their own. In fact, this Web site was initially designed to replace a previously existing ethics curriculum for a twelfth grade history seminar. While all students must be able to access this curriculum at any point during the course, they must undoubtedly be required to collaborate with peers in order to complete the required tasks and assessments under carefully established timelines. It will be the instructor's responsibility to establish the order of topics and completion dates for various assignments. One will note that of the nine topics, some are five-day modules, some are four-day modules, and there can be, on occasion, a three-day or six-day module established. This should be taken into consideration when creating the course syllabus. The site designers would recommend that a nine-plus week syllabus be created in which one topic would be addressed each week. This would provide a comfortable and clear rhythm to the curriculum.

Extending the Lesson

Besides the obvious relativity to an ethics curriculum, the Ethics & Morality Web site has incredible learning value beyond your standard on-line, Web-enhanced curriculum. Students will learn to begin their thinking and learning on the Internet, and then transfer topical understanding into collaborative classroom learning. The classroom environs will become the epicenter of further peer collaboration and cooperation as students expand their thinking and learning on the nine assigned topic areas in due time. Instructors will discover that the developmental ownership of one's thoughts is an incredibly powerful tool and incentive for adolescent learners. Knowing that their beliefs, and their work, will be evaluated and assessed by their peers on an on-going basis will create a sense of understanding that can be difficult to imitate in other teaching-learning environments.

Instructional Design Models

With the understanding that the very nature of this on-line curriculum is an anchored, or situated, instructional design approach, one cannot help but notice that inquiry-based learning and presentation are integral to the success of this instructional design model. Clearly, constructivism rules the roost over behaviorist and cognitivist approaches in this situated learning framework. Constructivism is based on the idea that humans must "construct" their our own, independent perceptions and knowledge of society through individual experiences and sorting. This is at the root of Jean Piaget's studies on adolescent developmental psychology. Undeniably, constructivist theory is based on the results of Piaget's research. "It differs from the traditional view, that knowledge exists independently of individual, the view that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet upon which a picture can be painted." (Strommen, 1992, in Sushkin, 1997, http://www.ic.polyu.edu.hk/posh97/Student/Learn/Learning_theories.html#constructivism) With that said, the primary teaching and learning strategies that are embraced in this dominantly anchored instructional design model include: inquisitory instruction, collaborative learning, expository presentation, generative learning, and problem-based learning. (Grabowski & Koszalka, http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/idmodels.html) Whichever strategy, the emphasis is placed on the learner rather than the teacher. It is the learner who interacts with objects, events, and peers; thus gaining an understanding of said features. The learner, therefore, constructs his or her own solutions to, and understandings of, problems. This can be termed learner autonomy.

The instructional design model herein is based on the Web site's intent to create a teaching-learning environment that is unique and combines what is best from both on-line and classroom frameworks. "Anchored instruction is a major paradigm for technology-based learning that has been developed by the Cognition & Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) under the leadership of John Bransford." (Kearsley, http://www.media.gwu.edu/~tip/anchor.html) Some of the principles of Bransford's anchored, or situated, learning framework include activities designed around an anchor (the Web site) which establishes case studies, generative topics, and/or problem-solving situations. Furthermore, the anchored framework sustains curriculum materials that allow exploration by the learner. Web-enhanced learning environments have the ability to merge the best of both worlds, the Internet technology of tomorrow with the classroom instruction of today.

Web-enhanced learning environments are, by their very nature, constructivist models in which knowledge is manufactured from experience, learning is a personal interpretation of the world, learning is an active process, conceptual growth comes from the negotiation of meaning, there exists the sharing of multiple perspectives and the changing of our internal representations through collaborative learning, and, finally, learning should be situated in realistic settings with testing that is integrated with the task and not a separate activity. (Merrill, 1991, in Smorgansbord, 1997, in Mergel, 1998, http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm#behaviorism) Constructivism, at its core, nurtures a more open-ended learning experience where the on-going methods and end results of learning are not easily measured and certainly not the same for each learner. According to Martin Briner, "constructivist learning is based on student's active participation in problem-solving and critical thinking regarding a learning activity which they find relevant and engaging." (Briner, 1999, http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/constructivism.html) Learners manufacture their own knowledge by testing various ideas and self-designed strategies for understanding based on prior experience and knowledge. Use of this prior knowledge in its application to the learning at hand is important in advancing the learner's complete, evolving understanding.

Student learners will pursue various problems or activities within this Web site by applying known approaches with alternatives offered by peers, research sources, or current, classroom experience. Through the trial and error of ideas and intellectual constructs, learners will begin to balance pre-existing notions of understanding with new experiences to construct an entirely original paradigm of understanding. Meanwhile, the teacher is present in the role of facilitator, or coach, throughout this instructional design approach. The teacher will direct the student toward multiple levels of critical thinking and analysis throughout the teaching-learning process. In many ways, the teacher is joining the student learner on an open-ended voyage into the learner's own understanding. While this voyage has a direction, the final destination cannot, and should not, be previously determined. (Briner, 1999, http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/constructivism.html)

Specifically, Ethics & Morality provides an on-line, anchored teaching-learning environment which provides multiple representations of modern social realities, uncovers the moral issues inherent in nine ethical topics, presents genuinely applicable tasks, provides real-world learning environments, examines case-studies for further understanding, promotes reflection, enables knowledge construction, and supports collaboration among learners. These, as noted by Jonassen, are the implications of constructivist learning environments for instructional design: "a constructivist design process should be concerned with designing environments which support the construction of knowledge." (Jonassen, [On-line]) Certainly, at its very root, constructivism embraces the ideal that learning outcomes are often not predictable, and that instruction must nurture student learning, not control it.

The site designers have created a site that produces a Web-enhanced curriculum that is much more facilitative in nature than prescriptive. There has been a conscientious effort to allow the direction of learning to be established by the learner, not the instructor. Assessment is overwhelmingly subjective because it does not depend on any quantitative criteria or basis. Instead, assessment is the result of the completion of process and self-evaluation by the student learner. Particularly, the site designers have made every effort to create a multiplicity of subjective assessments, including, but not limited to, reflective journals, position papers, role-playing, collaborative timelines, argumentative outlines, oral arguments, creative art, and personal ethics statements.

The underlying strength in a constructivist approach is that the student learner gains the possibility of interpreting multiple realities in a plethora of contexts. The student learner is better able to deal with real life situations as a result. "If a learner can problem solve, they may better apply their existing knowledge to a novel situation." (Schuman, 1996, in Mergel, 1998, http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm#behaviorism) The site designers held this notion tight in hand with the understanding that the targeted and projected student population would be composed of diverse learners with very real learning idiosyncrasies. With the high possibility that some students would possess learning disabilities and others might not behold English as their primary language, the Ethics & Morality Web site offers an ideal Web-enhanced teaching-learning environment for the non-prescribed student. We hope you will find it a useful instructional design model.