Tech Regulation
Curriculum Mapping
work-in-progress
Mapping the landscape of regulation in tech curricula
In today's landscape, where regulation around tech ethics and manipulation are on the rise. Among many ways of translation of this knowledge to design and technology practitioners, embedding ethics and regulation in education is the focus of this project. This is particularly crucial within technology, information, and design programs focusing more on designing for social impact in universities. But how are these aspects integrated into the curriculum, if at all? If teaching of regulatory topics is indeed happening, how is it framed within the technology, information, and design curriculum? Is there sufficient integration between tech and regulatory programs? These questions urge us to delve deeper into the connections between tech curricula and regulatory frameworks.
Through a process of 3 primary stages encompassing collection, analysis, and discussion, the project aims to shed light on existing practices and propose pathways for enhancing tech education in alignment with regulatory frameworks.
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We are collecting metadata of courses imparting knowledge regarding regulatory aspects of tech practice. The metadata includes course number, name, course description, school and department information, and weblinks to the program’s course catalog. We are using course description as the unit of analysis to describe nature of course as related to teaching Regulatory, Legal, and/or Policy topics.
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We are using course descriptions of the collected courses as a unit of analysis to characterize the current landscape of the course offerings related to regulatory topics.
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We plan to post an archive of the collection of these courses and our characterization for educators, researchers, and instructional designers to collect references for designing their own courses based on regulatory topics.
We plan to conduct co-creation workshops with educators in tech, information, and design programs to ideate ways to integrate, embed, and shape tech regulation in their course and program curriculum.
Navigating the path to regulation-based tech courses
The project embarks on a comprehensive exploration of the current state of tech curriculum pertaining to regulatory, legal, and policy dimensions. We aim the results of this project to contribute to different actors the following ways:
For HCI and Ethics Researchers/ Legal Scholars: Description of landscape of tech, info, and design curriculum in relation to the trends of tech-regulation efforts in industry and practice.
For HCI Educators: Collection and examples of curriculum as a foundation for tech, info, and design educators to apply findings from this study into their curriculum design
For Leaders or Strategists of Tech/Information/Design Schools: Foundation for goals and strategy planning for Information Schools leaders to plan for better human, material, and tool-based infrastructure for ethics and critical studies/curriculum planning.
In collaboration with Dr. Richmond Wong and Ajit Pillai. Know more about the collaborators.