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Moral Dimensions of Instructional Design

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Description

Osguthorpe, Osguthorpe, Jacob and Davies argue that instructional design is a moral endeavour in the sense teacher education already accepts for teaching. Following Fenstermacher, any human action undertaken in regard to other human beings carries questions of what is fair, right, just and virtuous. A designer is usually absent when learning happens, but that does not remove the moral dimension. It only makes it easier to overlook.

The argument turns on a distinction they take from Jackson (1986). The mimetic tradition transmits factual and procedural knowledge through an imitative process: test, present, perform and evaluate, reward or remediate, advance. The authors call that sequence "hauntingly similar" to ADDIE. The transformative tradition tries to change how learners see themselves in relation to others and the world, and cares for the learner "in their wholeness", including character. The authors do not reject the mimetic tradition. Their claim is that performance is not a sufficient criterion of success, and that designers who attend only to it produce instruction with unintended effects on learners.

"Moral" is scoped carefully. It does not mean professional ethics codes (such as not plagiarising), and it does not mean slipping lessons on virtue into content. It means how designers conduct and view their work in relation to the people who will use what they make.

The framework adds conscience formation, taken from Green's Voices: The Formation of Conscience (1999), on top of the standard designer competencies. It names five consciences:

  • Craft: holding oneself to the often unstated standards of the profession, beyond what a client demands. The example given is a designer who builds a first prototype quickly and then seeks feedback relentlessly.
  • Membership: asking what one owes the profession. The authors suggest the field's norms are weak partly because designers do not see their work as having moral aims.
  • Sacrifice: truth-telling and promise-keeping, and acting beyond self-interest for learners and for the design team.
  • Memory: rootedness, meaning drawing on the field's history and on the designer's own strengths, and giving learners ways to bring who they are to the topic.
  • Imagination: leading rather than executing a preconceived product, and proposing approaches a client has not considered.

The consciences develop through reflexive judgment, Green's term for differentiating what is right and good from what is not, through reflective thought.

Implications

Context

  • Applies wherever a designer's product reaches learners without the designer present: online courses, self-paced materials, corporate training, published curricula
  • Most pointed where a model is applied mechanically. The chapter opens with a corporate training unit whose model aimed at "zero defects" and counted a trainee's wrong answer as a defect in the person

Target Learners

  • Every learner a design reaches. The framework is about the designer, but its test is the learner's experience, including effects nobody measured

Target Learning Objectives

  • Transformative outcomes alongside mimetic ones: how learners come to see themselves and their relation to others, not only test performance
  • For the designer: a developed conscience of craft, membership, sacrifice, memory and imagination

Claims

Examples

  • Systematic Instructional Design — the ADDIE lineage the authors critique when it is run as mimetic procedure. They do not reject it: the framework "does not prevent designers from relying on extant models"
  • Design Thinking — its attention to stakeholders and power is one practical route to what the authors call transformative concern
  • Reflective Practice — reflexive judgment is a specific form of it

Key Sources

  • Osguthorpe, R. T., Osguthorpe, R. D., Jacob, W. J., & Davies, R. S. (2018). The moral dimensions of instructional design. In Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology (1st ed., pp. 563–573). EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/instructional_design_moral_dimensions (Original work published 2003 in Educational Technology, 43(2), 19–23)
Page metadata
Field Value
type theory
title Moral Dimensions of Instructional Design
description Osguthorpe and colleagues' argument that designing instruction is a moral endeavour, and their framework of five designer consciences (craft, membership, sacrifice, memory, imagination) developed through reflexive judgment.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-09-24
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