OU blog

Personal Blogs

Christopher Douce

TM470 Considering LSEPI (again)

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 4 Oct 2024, 16:03

This post follows on from an earlier post: TM470 Considering LSEPI. The difference between this blog and the earlier one is that this article places more emphasis on the ethics bit, specifically, how to treat participants ethically.

Before looking at anything specific, it’s useful to remind ourselves of what learning outcomes in TM470 relate to ethics:

LO10. Identify and address the legal, social, ethical and professional issues (LSEPIs) and the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) concerns that may arise during the development and use of computing and IT systems.

To gain a distinction for this learning outcome, you need to provide evidence to show that you have “comprehensively identified the relevant LSEPIs and EDI concerns arising during development and use and modified their project work to take these into account and behaved professionally in all aspects of [your] project work.”

At the beginning of your project it is very likely that you will be gathering requirements from stakeholders. During the middle of your project, you may well ask stakeholders for opinions about your intermediate designs, or emerging solutions; maybe asking their opinions about some prototypes. Towards the end of your project, you may (or may not) choose to carry out an evaluation. Your final project evaluation may involve stakeholders, who might be potential users of whatever product or system you have created.

Treating participants ethically

Given that you are likely to use participants throughout your project, what do you need to ensure they are treated in an ethical way?

A fellow TM470 tutor, Kawal Banga, offers the following useful summary: “you will need to consider how you are collecting data, where you are storing it, what stakeholder contact details you are storing, how you are ensuring anonymity and confidentiality, what will happen with the data on completion of the project, etc.“

Hold onto these points. 

Planning your project

TMA 1 is all about identifying a project, describing its aims, creating a plan and sharing it with your tutor. TMA 2 is all about showing that you have made some progress on your project and beginning to write about the ethical issues.

TMA01 states that:

“You will be considering in detail any legal, social, ethical and professional issues relating to your choice in TMA 02, but at this point you should consider whether these are likely to be serious enough to mean your project choice is inappropriate.”

It directs you to read some resources that have been prepared by the module team.

Before you begin writing your first TMA, do make sure you find the time to have a discussion with your tutor about your project and its aims.

In many cases, one of the first activities that you will carry out will be to establish requirements which may mean that you will need to talk to stakeholders. A stakeholder is, of course, anyone who has a vested interest in your project, or will be affected by its implementation or creation. Before you speak with anyone, you need to consider (as Kawal pointed out) how to collect data, what data you are collecting, and where you might be storing it.

TMA02 states that:

“If your project involves you working with human participants, you should include, as an appendix, your TMA02 LSEPI Form, found in the LSEPI Templates folder.” 

The point being made here is that you may need to address ethical issues before you get to your second TMA. Gathering requirements may mean working with people.

Working with stakeholders

When gathering requirements, if you need to consult people, it is important that you seek permission from those who you speak with and their line managers. Here is a suggestion about different resources that you should consider preparing before you interview anyone:

A project information sheet. This could be a single printed page, which you could then read before you go ahead with any data collection.

A consent form. This form is used to secure permission to gather data, and also to store data. More information about storing data can be seen in a related blog: Writing successful data management plans.

A set of interview questions, a set of survey questions and forms that can be used to gather responses.

Do consider sharing each of these with your tutor; they may well have some good ideas about how they might be improved.

Evidencing an ethical approach

When your examiner reads your project report, they will look for a description of what you have done and evidence that shows you have done what you have said you have done. Using a concept from creative writing, it is important to show the reader, rather than to tell the reader. 

You can show the examiner you have adopted an ethical approach by sharing evidence. You might, for example, share the following appendices:

  • Provide a copy of a project information sheet.
  • Provide samples of signed consent forms. You don’t need to provide copies of all the signed consent forms; one of each broad group of stakeholders will be enough. Make sure you hide any names and signatures. There is no reason why the examiner needs to see these.
  • Provide copies of any interview scripts or data collection forms.

Each appendix should, of course, be referenced within the body of your report.

Resources

The module website contains a number of helpful resources and pages. In particular, within the Legal, Social, Ethical and Professional issues resource, the following two sections are particularly useful:

  • Working with human participants
  • Appendix A Guidelines for conducting research with human participants

There is also a folder called LSEPI templates which can be found within the study materials section. At the time of writing, this folder contains the following files:

  • TMA02 LSEPI Form
  • consent-form-template
  • participant-information-sheet-template
  • EMA LSEPI Form

Do take the time to have a look at each of these files, and reflect on how they might be used within your project. 

When you submit your EMA you need to include a completed copy of the EMA LSEPI form as an appendix (which is something that be easily forgotten).

These above points offer some very practical advice about what you need to do to provide evidence of working with participants. This is, arguably, a very narrow treatment of the connection between your project and ethics. 

Thinking in an ethical way means that you need to consider the impact on any digital tool or product. If you are interested what this means, a good starting point is Carissa Weitz’s Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics (Oxford University press). You might find a chapter in this handbook that connects with the aim of your project. 

There is a requirements that your write about legal, social and ethical issues within your TMA 2 submission. If you're unsure about what this mean, or how to begin, a good bit of advice is, of course, find some time to speak with your tutor.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kawal Banga and the TM470 module team.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Christopher Douce

TM470 Considering LSEPI

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Christopher Douce, Wednesday, 24 Apr 2024, 10:44

In TM470 LSEPI is an abbreviation for Legal Social Ethical and Professional Issues. A good TM470 project report should clearly address these issues to show the examiner that you have thought about how these issues have impacted on your project, and what you have done to take these into account.

LSEP issues are increasingly important in computing due to the increasing impact that computing and IT has within society. When speaking with students I often a recent example: the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In this case, there are clear environmental impacts and legal implications. It is also clear that both the engineers and leaders have to make ethical decisions.

In TM470, LSEP issues are assessed through the following learning outcome: “LO10. Identify and address the legal, social, ethical and professional issues (LSEPIs) and the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) concerns that may arise during the development and use of computing and IT systems.” In the marking of the EMA, this learning outcome is assessed with LO2, which is all about the aims and goals of your project.  When just looking at the number of learning outcomes, and the marks available, the LSEPI section could account for 10 marks.

To gain a top score for this learning outcome a student: “has comprehensively identified the relevant LSEPIs and EDI concerns arising during development and use and modified their project work to take these into account and behaved professionally in all aspects of their project work”. EDI being an abbreviation for equality, diversity and inclusion.

Given the importance of both LSEP and EDI, a suggestion is to include it as a top level section in your report, just before the literature review section. The justification for this is that if you identify some issues that need to be explored in greater depth, you can then go onto provide evidence of your reading.

Module materials

At the time of writing, it takes a bit of digging to find two documents that relate to both LSEP and EDI issues. From the module website, click on the Resources heading, and then click on the Study materials section.

The LSEP document contains the following key headings: working with stakeholders, working with human participants, and asking the right questions. Do review the materials that are presented under these headings and review Appendix A Guidelines for conducting research with human participants. Related to these are two template documents: a sample consent form, and a participant information sheet.

Informed consent is the process through which researchers share the aims and purpose of their research with participants, and gain their approval that they are happy to participate in a study. The accompanying information sheet is designed to offer further information under a set of familiar headings.

When working with participants, I always remember two points. The first is that participants are at liberty to leave a study at any point. The second point is related: the participants are always more important than the research that is being carried out.

The equality, diversity and inclusion section addresses “why equality, diversity and inclusion are relevant to computing and IT professionals”, introduces the concept of protected characteristics, and “unconscious bias is and how it might affect your practice as a computing and IT professional” and what mitigations might be adopted (TM470 module materials).

EDI relates to people, and differences between people, irrespective of whether they are perceived or due to physical, cognitive or sensory impairments. Since Computing and IT products are, ultimately, used by people, it is necessary to consider EDI issues. If you design an app or a website, your product should be accessible to the widest possible group of users. The motivations for doing this are twofold: firstly, there is a legal obligation to ensure that products and systems are accessible under the Equality Act, and secondly, all users are potential customers. If a product isn’t accessible or perceived negatively, a consumer might choose another service that has a more accessible, usable, or appealing interface.

Looking at this issue from a slightly different perspective, if your project uses artificial intelligence or machine learning, it is necessary to question the extent to which biases might exist within either data that informs your project, and the extent to which bias might be potentially reinforced, or even magnified.

Questions to ask

As highlighted earlier, the LSEP materials contains a section that has the title: asking the right questions. 

Go through each of these questions in turn. 

When working through these questions, do think about the stakeholders who are involved with your project. A stakeholder can be thought of anyone who is affected by your project, either directly or indirectly. Ask yourself questions about what data might need to be held and collected, and what bits of legislation might play and impact if you were ever to deploy your project. The Equality Act was mentioned above. You might want to also consider data protection and computer misuse legislation.

If your project is a research report it is important to ask: what might be the impact of my report? If something is discovered by the report, what might be the impact of disclosing the results, or not disclosing the results? The point here is that it is important to go further than just the immediate project, but also to consider wider and broader impacts.

Differences between student projects and university projects

Before university staff can carry out research that involved human participants, they must submit project proposals through a formal ethics panel. The aim of this panel is to make sure that researchers have carefully considered everything, and any potential risks to all participants (and to the university) have been mitigated.

Unlike official university projects, undergraduate and postgraduate projects are not required to go through such a rigorous process. Rather than having an ethics panel and a lot of electronic paperwork to complete, students should think of their tutor or project supervisor as a mini ethics panel.

Interacting with your tutor whilst considering your LSEP and EDI issues should be thought of as a useful and necessary part of your project. Your tutor will be able to offer some thoughts about what needs to be considered. Plus, interactions with your tutor or supervisor can be documented in an appendix of your final reports.

Further resources

A lot of good resources about ethics are available, and some of these resources are mentioned in the module materials. Here are a collection of links that might be useful:

For those that find this subject really interesting, there is a whole suggested curriculum about Society, Ethics and Professionalism on the ACM website.

Going through the ethics bit of TM470 gives you a taste of what university researchers have to go through when they plan and design studies that involve human participants. More information about what goes on behind the scenes at the OU is presented through Ethics support for projects: Which studies need review, by whom and why? (OU blog)

Reflections

I find ethics a fascinating subject. In computing it comes into play more than you might initially expect since computing touches on so many different areas of human activity. Rather than being a subject that was once on the periphery of the discipline, I now see it as a topic that has moved to the centre. It is an important and necessary part of becoming a computing professional.

It is also interesting to reflect on how ethics has developed since I was a graduate student. There is now a lot more that has to be done, but this isn’t a bad thing. Additional scrutiny along the way helps researchers to carry out better research. For TM470 students, my key bit of advice is: speak with your tutor; they are your own personal ethics panel.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 2265060