Introduction to the Project:
Beginning in Module 3 and throughout the rest of the term, you will complete a project to develop a suite of proposals to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in organizations across disciplines and the surrounding community. The goal will be to leverage AI for innovation and/or solving an issue within your organization/profession. Each of you will create an independent proposal, which will become part of a set of AI proposals that your team will carefully coordinate and submit together in a packet. You team’s suite of proposals will, together, meet the needs across disciplines and of many different stakeholder groups, including those from traditionally vulnerable or marginalized populations.
You will also learn to conduct an ethical review of innovative proposals. In keeping with our conference theme that immerses you in an interdisciplinary environment, you will work on this project as part of an AI Community Challenge Team with classmates from your own and other disciplines. You will assume a leadership style and a professional role typical within your discipline and will carry this role throughout your time on the team. Your team membership will be determined by your instructor based on the short survey you filled out at the beginning of the module. (If you have not completed this survey yet, please do so right away.)
Why Team Work?
If you read any leadership blog or journal, you will quickly see that ethics has become an organizational priority. Leaders must model ethical decision-making and behavior. You will also see that collaboration across disciplines and geographic boundaries is increasingly imperative to solve problems. We need practice so that, during the challenging and volatile times, we can be strong enough and resilient enough to hold the ethical “line” in our organization. This course provides you with opportunities to practice. In Module 3, you will be placed into a team and will begin working in that team in Module 4. You will be dealing with a grant opportunity, which requires working across silos. You will be dealing with the intricate ethical dilemmas often embedded in innovations. You will practice being an ethical leader who makes decisions and gets things done.
Your role will be a dual one.
- You will act in a leadership role to collaborate with one another in an interdisciplinary manner to create an AI integration proposal for your own organization as part of a suite of AI proposals that supports the wider community. These will not be long AI proposals, but rather concise, evidence-backed, and inclusive of multiple stakeholders.
- Once all teams have created a draft of their AI proposals, you will act as an ethical review team for another team. In this role, you will apply ethical theories and tenets from your disciplines to evaluate a plan and offer ethical, evidence-based recommendations to improve the plan. This ability to apply ethical theory is critical. As Cassandra Burke Robertson stated in an article in defense of requiring ethics courses, “… in most situations, ethical dilemmas arise not from a situation where someone did not know the ethical rules in the abstract. Instead, they arise when individuals are unable to identify the relevant ethical principle in the event of a crisis.” (Robertson, 2019).
We know that teamwork is challenging. You will have group work of varying formats (task forces, teams, groups, etc.) throughout your degree program. We will provide resources to help you acclimate and support you in success in the asynchronous online format.
This project will account for a substantial portion of your grade in this course. Your active teamwork will account for 25% of your final grade, and your individual final submission will account for 20% of your final grade. You will find grading rubrics attached to each of the team activities. These lay out what is expected of you. Please review these, plus the activity instructions, carefully before you begin. Reach out to your instructor right away if you have questions.
This overview document lays out what you and your AI Community Challenge Team will accomplish by the end of the term. Your instructor will guide you through the process. Please carefully review it and reach out to your instructor with any questions you have.
Learning Outcomes:
Throughout your educational journey, you will be assessed on program-level learning outcomes that reflect the essential skills you need to master for your discipline. As this is an interdisciplinary course, you will be evaluated based upon our ethical leadership graduate career competency, with emphasis on the following outcome:
• 2.2 Justify decisions informed by ethical principles and disciplinary standards that address complex issues.
An Overview of Excelsiorville
Excelsiorville is a highly diverse city of over 86,000 people. Situated along a large river and home to a major public research university, Excelsiorville has a thriving riverfront and is home to many residential students. As a sanctuary city and a university town, there are people from many different cultures, with over fifteen different primary languages spoken. The median income level is $49,357.00, with 26% of residents living at or below the poverty rate. Based upon the poverty rate, all children in the Excelsiorville School District qualify for free breakfasts and lunches.
Excelsiorville’s public and business financial picture has been grim for over three decades, and impacts from the COVID – 19 pandemic and economic volatility have led to increasing strain on businesses, especially small businesses. Every industry has been hard hit, but is persevering. Excelsiorville is the county seat, so there are many public sector jobs represented. There are many small family-owned businesses, as well as several major banks, stores, and a thriving cement plant along the river. One of the state’s few minimum security prisons is also located in Excelsiorville, as well as the county probation office and local jail. The regional healthcare system from Minnesota has a hospital, an addictions treatment center, an outpatient health center, and a skilled nursing facility.
The public university has a major technology center. The university has approached public and private organizations with an offer to submit a multi-profession proposal for funding to integrate artifiical intelligence. This is a federal fund designed to help businesses modernize and become more efficient. This is a community collaboration grant. A condition for applying is that a minimum of three organizations representing different professions must come together with a proposal that can benefit a large cross-section of the community. In order to attract this grant funding, it will be necessary to collaborate across disciplines.
Module 3
Your Charge – Due Sunday of Module 3:
Your instructor has assigned you to your team this week. While you will not be meeting with your team this week, this will be a time for you to do some preparation for engaging with the team – much as you would in the professional realm. First, you will choose your leadership style that you will apply during your work with the task force. You will find resources about leadership styles in Module 2. Select a style that reflects the type of leader you aspire to be. Read up on it; take notes and familiarize yourself so that you can enact this style in your work on the team. Keep in mind that different leadership styles function better in certain contexts and environments. The ability to determine which leadership style to utilize at a given time, as well as the ability to determine the leadership style of others, is integral to success.
In Module 2, you will complete create your own ethical code. In creating your ethical code, you will have examined your discipline’s ethical code of conduct. You will be relying heavily on your ethical code and disciplinary code of conduct in your teamwork. In addition, you will need to become familiar with ethical theories prominent in your discipline. Again, take this
pre-work module to write some notes on what you find and keep them handy so that you can reference theory as you co – create your AI proposal, both individual and team, and evaluate the plans of others.
Next, you will assume a management or leadership role of your choosing in your discipline. You will find resources in Module 3 to support your decision-making.
Module 4
In Module 4, you will join your team to begin your work together. You will create your team charter, discuss what your suite of AI proposals should look like, and then plan out your schedule together. As a team, you will have your own group discussion page to work in. The expectation is that each of you will post discussions that cover the following over this module:
Individually:
First, go to your group area and post an introduction of yourself. Include your discipline and your chosen role. Remember, do not share your leadership style. In the workplace, leaders don’t introduce their style. Their teams need to learn this style and adapt to it.
As a Group:
Take a couple of days to make collaborative decisions. Here is what you need to decide quickly:
- What do you already know about artificial intelligence (AI), and what information do you need to gather?
- What type of organization is each team member going to use for this project? Each member should choose an organization in their discipline. Everyone should be in a different type of organization so that your fictional community has good representation on your team.
- Set a time to meet and plan out your work for the project.
- Complete your charter. This Charter lays out how you will accomplish your work, including roles, communication, participation, and whatever else you decide to add in. Remote teams are increasingly important in the workforce, and these negotiations and charter/contract documents will likely be an important aspect of your career fro m time to time. Ideally, you will do much of this in your meeting.
You will also divide up the work as would typically happen in a work based team and plan a time to reconvene to share results. Here is the actual work you will need to divide up amongst yourselves. Note that you will do your own research on the areas you are responsible for. As you find helpful resources, please share these with your task force members.
- Research on AI as appropriate.
- “Map” out each member’s proposed AI solution, so that you can ensure there are no duplicates or major gap areas.
- Create a shared working document to keep notes and communicate.
- Draft your own proposal using the template provided.
- Review your team members’ proposals.
- Be sure that you have a separate page for all of your references and that every reference is cited in the document. Each person’s proposal should have three credible sources. Some of you may use the same resource, and that is fine, as long as the resource supports what you are saying.
You will have two weeks to create a rough draft of your AI proposals. If you are strategic about how you communicate and work, you should be able to work interdependently, communicating asynchronously for the most part.
You will find helpful resources in the team assignment area. Your instructor will be in and out often to offer support and guidance and ensure you are on task, but this is your time to form your group. Good luck and have fun!
Module 6:
The Ethical Review
Now that your teams have created your AI proposal draft, it is time for your ethical team review to occur. Your instructor will assign your suite of proposals to another team to review, using an ethical review rubric. You will receive another team’s proposals to review. You will find the proposals to review posted in your team’s working area by Monday evening of Module 6.
For this week, you will evaluate the plan your team was assigned by using the criteria bulleted below. Here is the recommended sequence of steps to successfully accomplish this.
- Confer with one another to divide up the review.
- Your review should include completing the ethical review form/rubric. As you complete the form, consider the following:
• How well does this proposal align with your discipline’s ethical code of conduct? What ethical theory do you see
embedded in the decision made around the integration of AI?
• Consider who is left out of the plan. Who wields the power and control of the proposed AI solution?
• Are there areas that make you feel uncomfortable for some reason? We have a built-in ethical compass, and often our instincts are the first sign that something is ethically questionable.
• Are there areas that are ethically exemplary? - Be sure to apply your professional code of ethics and any ethical values embedded into your code as you do your part of the analysis.
- As you negotiate this review with your colleagues, be sure to share your discipline’s ethical perspectives. This is a
powerful opportunity to deepen your understanding of your own discipline and those of others! - Once you have done this, post your portions of your ethical review and review each other’s work. You may need to
come together in real time, or you may be able to do this using a shared document and comments.
Write Up the Review Report.
Once you have done your review, it is time to make ethical recommendations in areas where you identified issues. Here are the steps to take:
• Compile the review forms into one document. Add a Recommendations section at the end.
• Each of you must add at least one overarching recommendation to this review. Each recommendation should be collegial and constructive. It must be carefully explained and supported by an ethical framework. The team that created the plan should be able to follow your thinking and act on your recommendations.
• Shared documents can be a bit tricky to navigate, so be sure to keep a backup of all of your work on your own computer just in case something goes amiss.
• Once you are done, have someone on your team designated to finalize your ethical review. This person is responsible to ensure flow, ensure no inadvertent plagiarism has occurred, spell and grammar check, and then submit to your instructor for grading.
The ethical review submission is due at the end of Module 6.
Module 7
Team Project Finalization
In Module 7, your team will take the ethical review report and your instructor’s feedback and finalize your suite of AI proposals together. You should be in good shape for this, thanks to your charter and the strategic communication plan you develop early on. Here is a timeline for you to follow, based on our extensive experience on teamwork across organizations, disciplines, and even countries.
- Upload the single document with all of your AI proposals as a shared document.
- Complete revisions to your own AI proposal in this document by Thursday night. If you need to work offline, you can do so, and then copy/paste your work into the shared document.
- Review the AI suite of proposals by Saturday. Each member needs to post any changes or that they approve the document as is and are comfortable submitting it for funding consideration.
- Make sure that someone is designated to polish up the document. This member will ideally be someone who likes to work toward the end of the module. They should download the document from the collaborations space and then clean it up (spell, grammar check, address any tracked changes, remove any comment bubbles or differing font colors, etc.).
- This person will attach the final plan to the Module 8 discussion area for feedback by Sunday. Title the document with your team’s name and make sure that your members’ names are prominently listed in the body of your discussion board post. (Only the team member responsible for polishing up the document should post the plan to this board!)
- This person will also be responsible to submit the final plan to the assignment dropbox for instructor grading by Sunday.
In addition to posting to the class and to the drop box, your work will be graded individually, based on your own contributions to the team and your own deliverable itself. Each of you will submit your individual AI proposal (and any other portion to which you contributed) as an assignment. If easier, you can submit the entire plan and very clearly note which pieces you did.
In addition, you will submit a short reflective report at the end of this module, talking about the process. Here you will evaluate and reflect on your own work contributions to the task force. This should be an honest self-appraisal. See the assignment in your course for more details.
Module 8
Sharing Your Plan:
In our closing week together, you and your team will moderate the discussion thread containing your team’s AI suite of proposals. Respond to your classmates’ feedback to your plan. Also, go to several other teams’ plans and share your thoughts and recommendations.
Do you need urgent help with this or a similar assignment? We got you. Simply place your order and leave the rest to our experts.