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Is your syllabus available online? Engineering ethics sounds very interesting and it's the first time I hear about such thing.
by tomwojcik 3y ago
Is your syllabus available online? Engineering ethics sounds very interesting and it's the first time I hear about such thing.
- hoosieree 3y agoNothing public-facing, but here's the gist: It's a 6-week course. Each week, students respond to a prompt about an aspect of engineering ethics. The main task is to link real life examples to concepts from a professional code of ethics (we use the NSPE code[1]). NSPE also has anonymized and searchable "case studies"[2] with examples of how to apply this approach of "summarize the case and find the relevant parts of the Code of Ethics which apply here". In a typical course, I ask them to use real-life examples such as these: - Snowden leaks (privacy and consent of the governed) - Henrietta Lacks (ethics in biotechnology and patient rights) - Roger Boisjoly (whistleblowing) - Volkswagen emissions scandal (environmental consequences) After 4-5 of these drills, they research a case on their own and present about it for a group project. Class discussions dive into questions like "what would you do differently in this situation?" or "what if it was your family?" and "how would the consequences have been different if X instead of Y?" I try to emphasize that most situations don't have a single obvious ethically correct choice. It's more important for students to learn that codes of ethics exist, and that they can treat them as a decision-making framework. [1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics [2] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/ethics-resources/board-ethical-review-cases https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/ethics-resources/board...
- tomwojcik 3y agoThank you!