Gustavo Zurita, an academic at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEN) of the University of Chile, led the development of this collaborative technological tool that favors the discussion of ethical cases. It has an instructional design that can be built based on the requirement and need of the teaching teams, for the educational community.
Ethics education has become increasingly relevant in professional training, due to the public awareness of recent cases involving ethically questionable behavior by individuals in various organizations.
Gustavo Zurita, Full Professor, academic of the Department of Management Control and Information Systems of the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEN) of the University of Chile explains that EthicApp “is a web application that was designed to be a tool that supports “the teaching of ethics, integrating phases of collaborative and individual work anonymously, which facilitates the development of ethical discussions based on real cases.”
The development of this application arises from a series of research carried out jointly between Professor Zurita and Claudio Álvarez, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Los Andes; and whose initial results come from the Fondecyt 1161200 project, of which Professor Zurita is the responsible researcher. It should be noted that the purpose of this project was to analyze how pedagogical practices supported by technological tools can develop the skills of 21st century students.
EthicApp
The application can be used in various disciplines and educational levels, as it personalizes educational experiences with different content and educational objectives, and adapts to the specific needs of each group of students, in order to improve the quality of education and promote greater participation and reflection among students. To date, EthicApp has been applied in Universities in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and Spain; together with several collaborators and researchers.
EthicApp implements a methodology based on case learning, which facilitates the teacher’s task by identifying different types of arguments and content in the personal responses of the students, who in later stages reflect, argue and discuss ethical dilemmas together in teams. of work, which can be of different sizes and formed under different types of groupings.
Among its benefits, the analysis that the teacher can carry out on response trends stands out and, based on that, articulate the discussions and be able to apply them synchronously in face-to-face, online or hybrid mode. In addition, EthicApp can work on mobile devices, tablets or personal computers. Other advantages are associated with the use of short messaging, which is a format widely used by current generations of students to exchange opinions and make comments.
Regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence, Zurita maintains that “its implementation allows for the analysis and categorization of transcripts of anonymous chats between students, identifying patterns of group behavior. This analysis capacity facilitates the identification of productive discussions and the promotion of a deeper and more meaningful debate between participants.” Likewise, the efficiency in the management of educational activities increases, allowing teachers to concentrate on more critical aspects of the teaching process.
He adds that “students can express their points of view more openly and honestly, without fear of judgment from their peers, which enriches the educational process and encourages more diverse and reflective deliberation.”
In the future, research is geared towards using AI for the automatic creation of discussion groups based on specific criteria, as well as real-time monitoring of activities; and also introducing the use of intelligent agents based on LLM models, which act as mediators of student discussions, in order to achieve better results in the expected educational objectives.
Applied research
Recently, the article Improving the Learning Experience in Ethics Education with Groupware: A Case Study, prepared by the academic together with Claudio Álvarez and Luis Rojas from the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Design, Universidad San Sebastián, was incorporated into the book Lecture Notes in Computer Science, published within the framework of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
The research analyzes individual and collective behavior in ethical cases in various disciplines in software engineering students at a South American university, using EthicApp.
Among the findings, it is highlighted that EthicApp could be used for various types of tasks without prior training and that instructors can reuse learning designs and monitor activities in real time effectively. “EthicApp promises scalability to larger samples and integration into diverse courses, helping to develop ethical competencies as an interdisciplinary skill,” the document states.
