Ethics and Decision‐Making in a Course Management System: instructor and learner development

This study examines teacher and student development over the course of a semester in a business ethics class in which a course management system (CMS) was used to support ethical decision‐making. Dual methods were used to analyze instructor and learner development. An action research approach facilitated changes in practice that can be mapped to learner behaviors. Argyris and Schon’s (1978 Argyris, C. and Schon, D. 1978. Organisational Learning: a theory of action perspective, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. [Google Scholar]) theory of congruence framed instructor analysis while student data were analyzed with Kavathatzopoulos’s (1993 Kavathatzopoulos, I. 1993. Development of a cognitive skill in solving business ethics problems: the effect of instruction. Journal of Business Ethics, 12: 379–86. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) heteronomous or autonomous typology. Findings indicate some change in the instructor’s governing values with changes in action strategies. Online student groups ranged in the degree of documented ethical reasoning development and a positive correlation exists between grades and discussion forum activities indicating shifts in reasoning abilities.