Instructional Design and Ethical Pedagogy (IDEP) publishes original primary empirical research focusing specifically on instructional design in higher education. Authors should ensure that their manuscript clearly examines how instruction or learning is intentionally designed, implemented, and empirically investigated within universities, colleges, institutes, academies, or equivalent tertiary education settings.
Every manuscript must demonstrate substantive integration of ethical principles, moral values, character formation, and religious values within the instructional design itself. These dimensions should be reflected in the learning objectives, instructional strategies, learning activities, interactions, learning environment, and/or assessment rather than appearing merely as general background discussion.
A manuscript submitted to IDEP must satisfy all of the following requirements:
IDEP accepts only Original Research Articles reporting primary empirical data. Suitable methodological approaches may include:
IDEP does not consider manuscripts primarily based on:
- Research and Development (R&D) or educational product-development research;
- development of learning media, modules, applications, websites, platforms, instruments, or instructional products;
- Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR), scoping reviews, narrative reviews, integrative reviews, or similar review articles;
- bibliometric or scientometric studies;
- meta-analysis;
- conceptual, theoretical, philosophical, or purely normative articles without original primary empirical data;
- general educational technology studies where instructional design is not the central research object;
- general ethics, character, moral, or religious education studies without a clear instructional-design component; or
- studies conducted primarily outside higher education settings.
Authors should prepare manuscripts using the current IDEP article template and follow the journal’s formatting requirements. The manuscript should be written in clear academic English, present a coherent scholarly argument, and report the research transparently and accurately.
The manuscript should normally follow an empirical research structure consisting of Title, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Declarations, and References , with appropriate subheadings when required by the research design.
The title should be concise, informative, and accurately reflect the central research problem, instructional-design focus, higher education context, and principal variables or phenomena where appropriate. Avoid unnecessarily long titles, unexplained abbreviations, and overly promotional wording.
The abstract should provide a concise and self-contained summary of the study, including the research background, purpose, method, participants or research context, principal findings, and conclusion. The abstract should clearly indicate the instructional-design focus and the integration of ethical, moral, character, and religious dimensions.
Authors should provide relevant keywords that accurately represent the central concepts of the article and improve scholarly discoverability. Keywords should preferably include terms related to the instructional-design approach, higher education context, and value dimensions examined in the research.
The introduction should establish the research problem, relevant theoretical and empirical background, current state of scholarship, research gap, novelty, significance, and research objective or questions. Authors must explain why the selected instructional design requires or benefits from the integration of ethics, morality, character formation, and religious values within higher education.
The method section must provide sufficient information for readers to understand how the primary empirical research was conducted. Where relevant, authors should report:
- research design and methodological rationale;
- higher education setting and research context;
- participants, sampling strategy, and inclusion criteria;
- instructional design or instructional intervention investigated;
- how ethical, moral, character, and religious dimensions were incorporated into the instructional design;
- research instruments and their quality or validation where applicable;
- data-collection procedures;
- data-analysis procedures;
- procedures used to enhance validity, reliability, credibility, or trustworthiness; and
- ethical approval, informed consent, and other relevant research-ethics procedures.
The results section should present the empirical findings clearly, logically, and objectively in accordance with the research questions or hypotheses. Tables, figures, statistical results, quotations, themes, or other evidence should be used only when they contribute directly to understanding the findings.
The discussion should interpret the findings rather than merely repeat them. Authors should explain how the results extend, support, refine, or challenge previous scholarship and clarify the contribution of the study to value-integrated instructional design in higher education. The discussion should explicitly address the implications of ethics, morality, character formation, and religious values within the instructional design examined.
The conclusion should directly answer the research purpose, summarize the principal contribution without unnecessarily repeating the results, and identify relevant implications for instructional design in higher education. Authors may also identify important limitations and reasonable directions for future primary empirical research.
Tables and figures should be numbered consecutively, cited in the manuscript text, clearly titled or captioned, and presented in a form that can be understood independently. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of all data and for obtaining permission to reproduce third-party copyrighted material where permission is required.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that all citations and references are accurate, relevant, complete, and consistent with the current IDEP manuscript template. Every source cited in the text must appear in the reference list, and every item in the reference list should be cited in the manuscript.
References should primarily support the actual research problem and scholarly argument. Authors should prioritize relevant peer-reviewed and current scholarly literature while also citing foundational sources where necessary. Citation padding, coercive citation, excessive self-citation, or irrelevant citation intended primarily to manipulate citation indicators is not permitted.
Research involving human participants must be conducted responsibly and in accordance with applicable ethical requirements. Authors should disclose relevant ethical approval or institutional permission and describe informed-consent procedures where these are applicable to the study.
The manuscript must not contain personally identifiable or confidential participant information unless disclosure is ethically justified, legally permitted, and supported by appropriate consent.
Submitted manuscripts must be original and must not contain plagiarism, fabricated material, inappropriate text recycling, or undisclosed duplication. Manuscripts are subject to similarity screening in accordance with the IDEP Screening for Plagiarism Policy. A similarity percentage alone does not determine plagiarism; the Editorial Team evaluates the nature and context of overlapping material.
Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made substantive scholarly contributions to the research and manuscript. All listed authors must approve the submitted version and accept responsibility for their respective contributions. Guest, honorary, gift, ghost, or otherwise inappropriate authorship is not permitted.
Authors must disclose any financial, professional, institutional, personal, or other relationships that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the conduct, interpretation, or presentation of the research. The absence of a conflict of interest should also be stated where required by the journal template.
Authors should disclose financial support, grants, sponsorship, or other funding associated with the research. Where no external funding was received, this may be stated explicitly in accordance with the journal template.
Authors are responsible for retaining sufficient research records to support the reported findings. Where questions concerning research integrity arise, the Editorial Team may request reasonable supporting documentation, original data, instruments, analysis records, ethical documentation, or other relevant evidence, subject to participant confidentiality and applicable legal or ethical restrictions.
Artificial intelligence tools cannot be listed as authors because authorship requires accountability for the accuracy, originality, integrity, and scholarly content of the manuscript.
When generative AI or AI-assisted technologies have been used materially in manuscript preparation, authors should disclose the name of the tool or service and the purpose for which it was used. Authors remain fully responsible for checking the accuracy, references, originality, confidentiality, and appropriateness of all AI-assisted content.
AI tools must not be used to fabricate data, generate false references, conceal plagiarism, manipulate research findings, violate participant confidentiality, or misrepresent authorship and scholarly contributions.
Where applicable, authors may use the following structure: “During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used [NAME OF TOOL/SERVICE] for [PURPOSE]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as necessary and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.”
IDEP applies a double-blind peer-review process. Authors must prepare the review manuscript so that their identity is not unnecessarily revealed to reviewers.
- remove author names and affiliations from the anonymized manuscript;
- remove identifying information from document properties where practical;
- avoid wording that unnecessarily reveals the authors’ identities;
- place acknowledgements and identifying information in the appropriate separate submission field or file; and
- ensure that supplementary files intended for reviewers are appropriately anonymized.
A manuscript submitted to IDEP must not be simultaneously under consideration by another journal. Authors should withdraw a manuscript formally from IDEP before submitting substantially the same work elsewhere.
Manuscripts should be written in clear, coherent, grammatically accurate academic English. Authors are responsible for ensuring that language quality allows reviewers and readers to evaluate the scientific content accurately. Language editing must not alter data, findings, authorship, or the intellectual meaning of the research.
IDEP provides immediate open access to its published content. Published articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Users may share and adapt published material with appropriate attribution, for non-commercial purposes, and under the applicable ShareAlike conditions.
Before submitting a manuscript, authors should confirm that:
- the manuscript reports original primary empirical research;
- the research is conducted in higher education;
- instructional design is the central research focus;
- ethics, morality, character formation, and religious values are explicitly incorporated into the instructional design;
- the manuscript is not an R&D, SLR, bibliometric, meta-analysis, or purely conceptual study;
- the manuscript has not been published previously and is not simultaneously submitted elsewhere;
- all citations and references have been checked for accuracy;
- ethical approval and informed consent information is included where applicable;
- conflicts of interest and funding have been disclosed;
- any material use of AI-assisted technologies has been disclosed;
- the manuscript has been appropriately anonymized for double-blind review; and
- the manuscript follows the current IDEP article template and submission requirements.
Submission does not automatically guarantee external peer review. Manuscripts that fall outside the journal's scope, do not constitute primary empirical research, are not situated in higher education, do not focus centrally on instructional design, or fail to substantively integrate ethics, morality, character, and religious values may be declined during initial editorial screening without external review.
A manuscript is appropriate for IDEP only when it demonstrates a clear and substantive intersection of Higher Education + Primary Empirical Research + Instructional Design + Ethics + Morality + Character + Religious Values. All elements must be evident in the research itself, not merely mentioned in the title, introduction, or theoretical background.