Ethics Teaching in Undergraduate Engineering Education

TL;DR: It was clear that the socio-ethical education was not effective enough to achieve its objectives in producing socio responsible engineers and some new strategies were proposed in teaching socio- unethical subject in engineering programmes to enhance the positive attitude towards socio- ethical issues among the engineering students.

TL;DR: This study assesses the effectiveness of AIID as an educational tool to raise awareness regarding the prevalence and severity of AI harms in socially high-stakes domains and compiles students’ feedback about the tool and class activity into actionable recommendations for the database development team and the broader community.

Abstract: The meaningful inclusion of ethics in engineering education often seems to be a challenge in programs which are already packed full of technical content. Most often the ways in which ethics are included into engineering education relates to microethical issues such as ethical codes or personal professional conduct in the office. Macroethical topics, such as the profession’s ethical obligations around climate change or sustainability, are less common and the ways in which macroethics are included in engineering courses has not been well studied. Two surveys were developed to explore the ways in which faculty teach students about macroethical issues; one focused on curricular settings and the other on co-curricular settings. Participants were asked to describe general topics that they covered in their respective settings and then to describe in detail the ways in which they include the societal impacts of engineering in a single course or cocurricular activity including specific topics, educational approaches and assessment tools. At the end of the survey, participants were asked in a free-response question to share their thoughts about the education of engineering students regarding broader impacts and ethical issues. This paper focuses on faculty response to this question. There were 406 responses to the open-ended question. These responses were coded using emergent, thematic coding. Inter-rater reliability was established for frequently-identified themes. The analysis of these themes highlighted four main themes: current practices, topics, challenges, and goals/opportunities. In talking about current practices, some faculty focused on engineering service opportunities or experiential learning as effective approaches. Examples of topics that were discussed include justice and community development contexts. Examples of challenges that were discussed include faculty having a limited knowledge or training about how to teach ethics or that ethics education is currently taught in ways that are too black and white and more nuanced topics should be included. Some goals or opportunities that faculty talked about indicate that students should receive a broader exposure to the societal impacts of engineering and that students should learn how to identify and negotiate work related ethical dilemmas. Some differences were found in the frequency that challenges and goals/opportunity-related themes were used between gender, tenured/tenure-track (T/TT) vs. non-T/TT, and institution types. The paper provides an interesting view of faculty perspectives on teaching ethical issues.

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TL;DR: In this paper, the ABET accreditation criteria for process skills and awareness skills are reviewed with an emphasis on how they can be taught, or more correctly learned, citing a number of examples of successful and/or promising implementations.