The Engineering Ethics Toolkit is a suite of interactive resources, guidance and teaching materials that enables educators to easily introduce ethics into the education of every engineer. We would like to ensure that all universities with Engineering departments are aware of the toolkit and able to make use of it.

To this end, we’ve produced a pack of resources that can be distributed to relevant departments and staff members such as Engineering department heads, staff and administrators, as well as Vice-Chancellors, Deans, and anyone else who may find our resource useful in teaching or curriculum development.

We would be very grateful if you could share these resources, and encourage you to explore and use them in your teaching.

Our pack of resources to help you present and promote the Engineering Ethics Toolkit contains the following files, and can be downloaded individually below, or as a pack from here.

Information on the toolkit (PDF)
01. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – key talking points
02. Media release July 2023 – Engineering Professors’ Council
03. Engineering Ethics – overview

Sample resources (PDF)
04. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Advice and Guidance – Why integrate ethics in engineering
05. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Case study – Developing an internet constellation
06. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Case enhancement – Developing an internet constellation

Promotional display posters (PDF)
07. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – poster
08. Ethics Explorer – poster
09. Ethics Ambassadors – poster

Promotional images (JPG)
10. Engineering Ethics Toolkit Logo
11. Ethics Explorer front page
12. Students at TEDI-London
13. Students in discussion

PowerPoint slides (pptx)
14. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Overview
15. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Talking points
16. Engineering Ethics Toolkit – Ethics Ambassadors

You can download the entire pack from here.

If you have any questions or comments about this resource, please contact w.attwell@epc.ac.uk.

 

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You’re an engineering student on an industrial placement year at a company that manufactures cosmetics. The company is involved in a big project that focuses on alternative, more environmentally friendly cosmetic chemistries. You notice that a batch of products might have been contaminated with microplastics. You flag this up to your supervisor but they wave your concerns away. What do you do?

This is the dilemma presented in our Engineering Ethics Toolkit case study Microplastics in cosmetics.

We’ve provided this, and other case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching. If you’re new to ethics, we have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started. Please take a look and give us your feedback.

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.

As an engineer, you have a duty to maximise the public good and minimise both actual and potential adverse effects for your own and succeeding generations. Should you break the law to uphold this principle?

This is the dilemma presented in our Engineering Ethics Toolkit case study Engineers and Public Protest.

The engineer in this case has to weigh personal values against professional codes of conduct when acting in the wake of the climate crisis. This case study allows students to explore motivations and justifications for courses of action that could be considered morally right but legally wrong. 

We’ve provided this, and other case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching. If you’re new to ethics, we have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started.

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.

“There are three lenses that we can use when thinking about ethics within Engineering: Professional, Theoretical, and Practical.”

If you’d like to improve your own ethics learning, then our Engineering Ethics Toolkit guidance article What is ethics? is a great place to start.

This article should be read by educators at all levels in higher education who wish to better understand ethics and its connection to engineering education. It will also be useful for students who are being introduced to the topic. 

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.

You’re a newly appointed engineer. You’re being asked to sell equipment that you believe is entirely unsuitable to a developing country. Your own job security is at stake. You have to make the right decision. What do you do?

This is the situation you’ll be confronted with in the case study Aid vs Trade, part of our Engineering Ethics Toolkit, which aims to help educators to introduce ethics into the engineering curriculum, and to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering.

This case study is situated in Ghana, and the engineer in it must weigh perspectives on environmental ethics that may differ from those informed by their own (different) cultural background, as well as navigating unfamiliar workplace expectations. That the engineer’s own job security is also at stake may complicate decision-making.

We’ve provided this, and other case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching. If you’re new to ethics, we have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started.

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.

Within the EPC family, our members have continued to face enormous challenges and the EPC offers thoughtful leadership and representation to ensure we can best support our members in meeting these challenges. Alongside events and blogs, members can access the EPC’s online bank of best practice resources such as out toolkits and our data explorer. Click on each of the tabs below to see some of our highlights:

Sustainability ToolkitEngineering Ethics ToolkitCrucible Project ToolkitData Explorer

We are excited to inform you that we are starting work on our Sustainability Toolkit, to be launched around the beginning of 2024. We are grateful to receive support and funding from Siemens and The Royal Academy of Engineering on this project.

There is an urgent need to increase sustainability awareness and skills. This is especially important for Engineering education so that all new graduates are motivated and equipped to tackle the serious sustainability challenges facing the environment and society.

To achieve this the Engineering Professors’ Council (EPC) is developing a toolkit for UK Engineering academics to ensure that sustainability is essential to and fully integrated within the learning of Engineering students. The toolkit will be open source and in time it will be connected with similar projects to create a global resource for Engineering educators.

While many excellent resources explain the sustainability knowledge, skills, and mindsets essential for 21st-century engineers, very few resources exist that support engineering educators to integrate these into their teaching in a comprehensive and effective way.

The aim of this project is to develop and curate a toolkit of resources that help academics explicitly embed sustainability in their day-to-day practice of engineering teaching, and to help make sustainability integral to rather than tangential to engineering learning.

Work has already begun and we are making progress with guidance from our Sustainability Toolkit Steering Group. The steering group is composed of academic, industry, and advocacy leaders who are passionate about sustainability and it will help guide the development of outputs such as those created for the EPC’s Engineering Ethics Toolkit. It will work alongside our project partners, including the Royal Academy of Engineering, Siemens, and the Lemelson Foundation which has supported work on a similar initiative in the US. The project will run from February through December 2023.

We will update you on the progress and look forward to launching the toolkit in 2024.

The EPC was delighted to announce the official third phase of our Engineering Ethics Toolkit in February 2023. This growing resource is being developed by the EPC with the generosity and support of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as part of the profession’s on-going work to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering. 

The EPC’s 2021-2023 President Prof. Mike Sutcliffe wrote a short blog to welcome you to this ambitious new initiative to ensure engineering education is a force for good, which you can read here.

The first and second phases in the development of the ethics toolkit involved the creation and publication of a range of case studies and guidance articles to help engineering educators integrate ethics content into their teaching.

The launch of our case studies and guidance articles, and the importance of these resources and embedding ethics into engineering education was reiterated by Prof. David Bogle just before our toolkit was live at the launch of the 2022 “Engineering Ethics: maintaining society’s trust in the engineering profession” report from the joint Engineering Council / RAEng, Engineering Ethics Reference Group. Our case studies come under the Education and Training actions of this report, which aim to support and improve how ethics is understood by those in the engineering profession. 

2023 has seen the development of activity enhancements for nine of our case studies, as well as the publication of thirteen new case studies and eight new guidance articles, bringing our total  up to 25 case studies, nine enhancements, and twelve guidance articles.

In addition, we have updated the static ethics curriculum map into the interactive Ethics Explorer, which helps educators to get started on or develop their ethics journey, meeting them where they are at any stage of experience, and helping them to understand, plan for and implement ethics learning.

This new content was launched in a well-attended webinar in March this year.

March 2023 also saw the launch of Ethics Ambassadors – a new community of practice created to champion the Toolkit and support educators embedding ethics into engineering.

We are currently working on further projects to enhance and promote the Engineering Ethics Toolkit, including:

  • A search tool that will be able to provide ethics results specifically tailored to a user’s needs;
  • A call for further toolkit contributions in the form of blogs, guidance, case studies and enhancements;
  • Rolling out an Educators’ Pack to all universities;
  • Launching a competition and awards for educators using the toolkit;
  • Creating further webinars, workshops and other events.

These will all be rolled out by the end of 2023.

The EPC’s Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer (RIKT) Committee put out a call in July 2021 for members to submit academia-industry partnership case studies. By the end of the call, nearly 50 applications were received and a sub-group of the RIKT Committee shortlisted 25 of these to be presented at an online launch webinar for the Crucible Project on the 16th February 2022. Over 120 attendees joined us for this online event which saw a huge range of case studies outlining innovative and engaging collaborations between academia and industry, as well as a guest lecture by Prof. John Patsavellas (Cranfield University).

Subsequent to this, the Crucible Project Toolkit was launched on the EPC website in April 2022 to showcase the case studies presented at the event but also many more – access to these individual case studies is an exclusive EPC member benefit. The RIKT Committee envisions this toolkit as a living and growing resource to help EPC members to find research funding, place graduates in employment, create work-based learning opportunities and so on. Next steps for the Crucible Project Toolkit include a system to allow members to contribute their own, or further case studies to ensure that this resource continually grows.

As part of the development of EPC Online we have created the Data Explorer feature – this members-only resource presents data visualisations specially designed to help EPC members explore a wealth of engineering sector datasets and to show data customised to the interest of Engineering academics in any discipline. The data is arranged according to population:

  • Applications and admissions;
  • Student enrolments;
  • Student completion and;
  • Academic staff

These sections each contain a variety of questions that can be explored through interactive charts and tables. Additionally, members are able to download the dataset can be downloaded to allow sorting and presenting in ways that will be most helpful to them.

The EPC Board considered its own ethical responsibility – including representing our members’ views, supporting good practice and as an organisation – at its retreat in January 2020.

This led to the clear action for the EPC to promote engineering ethics more proactively and adopt clear ethical positions.

A key aspect of this is enabling the embedding of ethical best practice into the UK engineering higher education curriculum through creation of an ‘Engineering Ethics Toolkit’.

Please find a wide selection of resources related to this campaign below, including the Engineering Ethics toolkit (created by the Engineering Professors’ Council with support from the Royal Academy of Engineering), and Ethics Ambassadors, a new community of practice aimed at championing the embedding of ethics within engineering.

To request membership of the EPC’s Ethics Ambassadors community, please fill out the form below.

 

The latest vote is now closed.

Please only use this voting form if you are already a member of the Ethics Ambassadors community.

If you wish to join Ethics Ambassadors, please apply here.

 

 

What is circularity, and how does it relate to climate goals or environmental practice?

This is one of the questions posed in our Engineering Ethics Toolkit case study Recycled materials and the circular economy.

This case involves an engineer responsible for verifying the source of recycled construction material to ensure it is not contaminated. It address the ethical issues of risk and respect for the environment, and examines situations that professional engineers need to consider, such as conflicts of interest, public health and safety, legal implications, whistleblowing, and corporate social responsibility.

We’ve provided this and other case studies – which include classroom activities and additional resources – for you to use and adapt in your teaching. We also have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an interactive Ethics Explorer to get you started.

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. You can join our Ethics Ambassadors community here.

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