What is Human Research Protections

The goal of this chapter is to identify ethical concerns that instructional designers should be aware of when designing and developing learning games, simulations, and virtual worlds. Partly taken from ethical considerations that researchers are required to follow as part of standard institutional review board processes for the protection of human subjects, we suggest specific ethical principles which designers should consider prior to and during the design of these complex learning systems as well as during the evaluation of the products. We provide examples from existing and past learning games, simulations, and multi-user virtual environments that have either followed these principles or left questions to be addressed and propose a series of ethical considerations in future designs.