“Consideration needs to be given to improving our students’ ethical learning throughout their course or programme. We argue that ethics can and should be embedded into most modules in a natural way, giving as much or as little time to it as necessary. A more sophisticated understanding will be arrived at over time by exposing learners to more and more complex cases where the outcome is not obvious. A graduate engineer should be able to give a considered response to an employer’s question about an ethical position during an interview.”
“Consideration needs to be given to improving our students’ ethical learning throughout their course or programme. We argue that ethics can and should be embedded into most modules in a natural way, giving as much or as little time to it as necessary. A more sophisticated understanding will be arrived at over time by exposing learners to more and more complex cases where the outcome is not obvious. A graduate engineer should be able to give a considered response to an employer’s question about an ethical position during an interview.”If you’re not sure where to start with embedding ethics into your teaching, then our Engineering Ethics Toolkit guidance article How to integrate ethics into a module or course can help.
This article should be read by educators at all levels in higher education who wish to integrate ethics into the engineering and design curriculum or module design. It will also help prepare students with the integrated skill sets that employers are looking for.
We have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you as you expand your understanding of engineering ethics, and begin to embed it within the curriculum, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started. We also have a library of case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching.
If you would like to give feedback on this or any other Engineering Ethics resource, or submit your own content, you can do so here. We also have a newly created community of practice that you can join, where we hope that educators will support each other, and share their success stories of teaching engineering ethics. You can join our Ethics Ambassadors community here.
