The EPC has introduced a major new initiative to ensure the engineers of tomorrow can rise to the challenges of the climate emergency: The Sustainability Toolkit, produced with support from the Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens. EPC President, Prof John Mitchell invites you to explore.
Professor John Mitchell, EPC President
In order to ensure that recent engineering graduates are prepared to meet the challenges of today, it is imperative that they develop a greater level of sustainability knowledge and expertise. Sustainability should become the core tenet of engineering education, training and professional practice â a view supported by research undertaken by UCL and the EPC also published by the Royal Academy of Engineering today.
A rising number of groups are advocating that engineering programmes prioritise sustainability in addition to technical knowledge in order to provide aspiring engineers with the tools and perspective they need to be successful. A plethora of areas at the policy level demonstrate this including: The Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes in engineering (AHEP, 4th edition) standards demonstrating the significance of engineering’s impact on the environment.
As part of our commitment to support EPC member institutions to integrate sustainability content in their engineering education, we’re pleased to unveil twelve guidance articles, 18 different teaching resources including five case studies, and a library of links to sustainability communities and networks that promote collaborative efforts.
The toolkit will operate as an open-access platform where users can also submit their resources for review and inclusion. Additionally, it directs users to supplementary materials curated by a team of experts.
We’d like to express our gratitude to the Sustainability Toolkit Steering Group, our Sustainability Toolkit Contributors, and our brilliant supporters, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens for their unwavering assistance and backing. Chris Wise, steering group chair, has been amazing at leading by example â with his expertise and passion for embedding sustainability into the curriculum, he ensured this project reached this point seamlessly.
Sarah Jayne Hitt (Project Manager), Crystal Nwagboso (Project Manager, Research and Editorial Lead/Analyst), and Johnny Rich (Chief Executive) have also done a fantastic job of keeping everyone on course and generating excellent tools guided by the best standards.
I’m immensely proud of our collaboration with Siemens and the Royal Academy of Engineering on the new EPC Sustainability Toolkit. We’re not just shaping educational resources. Weâre shaping the engineers who will shape our future.
We sincerely hope you will find these tools helpful in integrating sustainability into the classroom. Kindly let us know about your experience using them and stay tuned as we’ll be expanding the toolkit. Do get in touch or see the Toolkit for further details about submitting your own content.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
The EPC’s Engineering Ethics Toolkit is supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering. This resource is designed to help engineering educators integrate ethics content into teaching.
Contents
The toolkit currently includes the following, but it is a growing resource and we are currently working on further content.
Ethics Explorer: An interactive tool to help educators navigate the landscape of engineering ethics education. Start here and find your own pathway for embedding ethics.
Advice and guidance: A library of expertise in engineering ethics and how best to embed learning into teaching practice.
Case studies: Worked examples of real and hypothetical situations presenting ethical engineering challenges for use in teaching scenarios.
Case enhancements: Teaching materials and resources that help educators to employ the ethics case studies and lead the activities referenced within them.
Reports and studies: The latest research on ethics within engineering education and the engineering profession.
Blogs: Personal experience, news and updates on the Engineering Ethics Toolkit.
Get involved: A guide to how you can contribute to the Engineering Ethics Toolkit and community.
Contributor biographies: We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to making the Toolkit such a useful and vital resource.
Our supporters: We would like to thank the Royal Academy of Engineering, which has supported the Engineering Ethics Toolkit since its inception.
Our supporters
These resources have been produced by the Engineering Professorsâ Council in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering as part of the professionâs on-going work to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering. See our blog ‘Welcome to the Engineering Ethics Toolkit‘ for an introduction and thoughts on these resources from the EPC’s Vice President.
Licensing
To ensure that everyone can use and adapt the toolkit in a way that best fits their teaching or purpose, most of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Under this licence you are free to share and adapt this material, under terms that you must give appropriate credit and attribution to the original material and indicate if any changes are made. Some of these materials are also available as PDF documents on the RAEng website.
More to come
This is just the beginning â we are already working on expanding this toolkit with future projects, including: developing more case studies, devising a system to make the case studies searchable by engineering discipline, ethical issues and so on. Additionally, we are looking to create ‘enhanced’ versions of each case study, including specific teaching materials such as lesson plans, presentations and worksheets. For more information, see our Get involved page.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
Our toolkits are separate but overlapping resources designed to support our members to be more professional in what they do. All toolkits are open to members to submit resources or get involved in their further development.Â
Some toolkit content is available to members only. For best results, make sure youâre logged in.
Our toolkits:
Our Complex Systems Toolkit (currently in development) is aimed at supporting educators in their teaching of the subject.
Our Sustainability Toolkit is designed to help engineering educators integrate sustainability-related content into teaching.
Our Enterprise Collaboration Toolkit (formerly known as the Crucible Project) is the EPCâs landmark project supporting university and industry collaboration in engineering by showcasing and sharing the keys to success.
The Intellectual Property Toolkit is as set of IPO guides to patents, trade marks, copyright or design: how intellectual property applies to the work of engineering academics.
Our Placements Toolkits (formerly Contextual Learning Toolkits) address the recommendations of the Perkins Review of Engineering Skills and the Royal Academy of Engineeringâs Universe of Engineering Report about engineering studentâs placements in companies.
The Recruitment and Admissions Toolkit (Archive) provides links to a range of resources and information to help university admissions tutors and those working in recruitment and admissions roles. Note: this toolkit has not yet been updated.
Within About Toolkits you can find the following pages:
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
Have you used our Engineering Ethics Toolkit in your teaching? We want to hear from you!
In March 2023 we published further guidance articles and case studies, as well as enhancements on some of the classroom activities suggested within our original cases. June 2023 saw the launch of the interactive Ethics Explorer, which replaced the static engineering ethics curriculum map from 2015. Since then the Toolkit has continued to grow.
More and more engineering educators are telling us that they use these resources, and are finding them invaluable in their teaching. A brave few have contributed blogs, detailing their methods of using and adapting our case studies and classroom activities, and giving an honest appraisal of their own learning curve in teaching ethics.
We would love to publish more of this type of content. We want to hear your experiences, good or bad, along with tips, potential pitfalls, what you added to our content in your teaching, and what you and your students got out of the experience. If you have students who are enthusiastic about sharing their thoughts, we would love to hear from them too.
We’d like you to send us your feedback, testimonials or blogs, whether that be a couple of sentences or paragraphs, or a full article with diagrams, or anything in between.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
Authors: Dr. Jude Bramton (University of Bristol); Elizabeth Robertson (University of Strathclyde); Sarah Jayne Hitt, Ph.D. SFHEA (NMITE, Edinburgh Napier University).
Keywords:Â Collaboration; Pedagogy.
Who is this article for?:Â 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.
How to organise class sessions:
Engineering educators can find a wealth of ethics case studies in the Engineering Ethics Toolkit. Each one focuses on different disciplines, different areas of ethics learning, and different professional situations, meaning there is almost certainly a case study that could be embedded in one of your classes.
Even so, it can be difficult to know how to organise the delivery of the session. Fortunately, Toolkit contributors Jude Bramton of the University of Bristol and Elizabeth Robertson of the University of Strathclyde have put together diagrams that demonstrate their approaches. These processes can act as helpful guides for you as you integrate an Ethics case study in one of your engineering class sessions.
Jude Bramtonâs class session organisation looks like this:
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
Elizabeth Robertson, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at The University of Strathclyde, discusses how we need to move past our discomfort in order to teach ethics in engineering.
I could wax lyrical about the importance of engineering ethics for todayâs students who are tomorrowâs engineers. However, there are lots of other articles that will do it much better than I can. All Iâd say in short is that as educators, we know itâs important, our graduate employers tell us itâs important, and our accrediting bodies are looking for us to include it through our curriculum because they know itâs important too.
The task for us as educators then is to demonstrate the importance of ethics to our students and to offer students a learning experience that is relevant to them at whatever stage they are and that that will also offer the most impact â but as with so many things, that is easier said than done.
Getting comfortable with what the toolkit is and how to use it
I have used the Engineering Ethics Toolkit since its launch, and I cannot be a bigger proponent for its usefulness for staff or its impact on studentsâ learning. Educators are always challenged to design sessions that are engaging, participatory and have real student impact. With its range of case studies and really useful advice and guidance documents, the Engineering Ethics Toolkit does all three.
The suite of broad engineering ethics case studies means that there is a case study for a range of student needs (and there are often new ones on the horizon too). In my teaching that means sometimes I use case studies that are related to discipline-specific learning the students are currently undertaking so they can pull in technical knowledge and experience they have, and in other cases I choose something totally removed in order to allow students to spend more time with the ethical dimensions of a case and not get preoccupied with the technical.
The case studies Iâve used
During the last academic year we used the case study âGlass safety in a heritage building conversionâ with my first year groups, and thatâs pretty far removed from the electrical, mechanical and computer science modules they take. That decision was intentional; the aim was to get students to concentrate on the principles of ethics, stakeholder mapping, stakeholder motivations and interpersonal dynamics and not be âdistractedâ by the technical aspects. This was one class in a module centred around a sustainable design challenge and we used the Ethics toolkit to help students develop an understanding of the importance of economic, environmental and social factors. Working with a case study not in their exact engineering field helped students see that they must look beyond the technical to understand people â be they stakeholders, end users or community members. Students worked to make decisions on actions with honesty and integrity and to respect the public good. The students engaged really well in the session and there were some vibrant discussions on which actions were ârightâ or âwrongâ and vitally the students grasped how stakeholder dynamics and dynamics of power in projects can affect outcomes.
In comparison, for my third year undergraduate students I intentionally chose a case study that would link to their hardware/software project that was upcoming, and connect closely to learning in their communications module: âSmart homes for older people with disabilitiesâ. This meant that alongside stakeholder mapping we identified technical factors looking into possible routes of data leaks. Students engaged so well and were actively debating possible actions to take covering ethical, technical and legal implications. It pained me every time I had to cut conversations short so we could cover the full case study â so much so that this year weâre going to try and give them longer than an hour for the process.
Getting comfortable with the students in the lead
I use a participatory teaching methodology often. This means starting our 50 minutes together with student reflection, having 5/10 minutes of introductory talk and then rounds of group discussions. The students are therefore in the driving seat in the classroom â students set the tone and the pace. If they are having valuable, meaningful and worthwhile discussions and demonstrating valuable ethical discussions, my plans change. This means maybe not covering all parts of the case study  maybe skipping a stage or two of discussions that were in my plans. As long as the sessionâs objective are met, the students can write their own journey.
What my sessions look like
As the song goes, we start at the very beginning as itâs a very good places to start. That means first asking the students their current understanding of what ethics is â we did this first by using a word association activity, and asked what came to mind when they hear the term âethics.â Their answers in the word cloud below demonstrate a good maturity of thought to work from in the session. We then moved on to discuss when we should consider ethics â for us as individuals, members of society and as engineers.
What they said:
Building on from our prompting questions we then introduced the Statement of Ethical Principles published by the Engineering Council and the Royal Academy of Engineering and covering the four fundamental principles of ethics defined therein.
From there we worked with the toolkit and our case study of choice. Most case studies come in 2-4 âphasesâ, each with a bit more of the story that Iâd briefly talk over, which we gave them printed and electronically. The phases often include a âdilemmaâ for the protagonist and some questions for provoking thought and discussion or more technical work as is suitable. The questions and activity prompts that are within the case studies are invaluable to educators and students in helping design the session and for giving student groups a place to start if they are not sure how to tackle part of the story. We worked on a think-pair-share model asking individuals to think, groups to discuss, and then asking a few groups to report back to the room. One thing I want to do more of is asking different groups to role play as different stakeholders. Asking students to embed themselves in different perspectives can lead to some very valuable insights.
Getting comfortable in a room of differing views
Students worked in small groups with the case study and an important stage was asking groups to report back their thoughts. These were volunteered rather than cold-called and in asking for more groups to share I would prompt if anyone had a different view to make sure that a range of perspectives were heard. Though in fairness to the students they engaged so readily and enthusiastically that I often ran short of time rather than being left with âdead airâ.
I have delivered ethics sessions to groups of 12, 30 and 100. In all cases it is important that all students feel heard and all views and perspectives respected. You need to make sure that an open, honest, and non-judgemental tone is set. This allows all students to feel they are free to ask questions and importantly share their perspectives, meaning that there is a big onus on the educator to act as a facilitator as much as a teacher.
Good facilitation is key. Some things to think about:
Consider room layout. – Flexible seating in small groups has worked best for me. If Iâm not using the whole space I place resources (printouts of the case study) on the tables I want used so no-one is left alone at the back of the room.
How do you build discussion groups? – Will established (friendship) groups all agree with each other and therefore discussions die, or will their knowledge of each other help them challenge each other?
How can you engage the whole room? – Cold-calling can challenge a neurodiverse audience, and so you need to consider ways to include everyone in discussions, but not put anyone on the spot.
How do you set the right tone? – This enables discussions to be open and honest and allows all voices and perspectives to be heard.
Getting comfortable with no absolutes
What is vital in running these sessions is offering some sort of conclusion when there is no ârightâ answer. My third-year cohort knew that a class on ethics was in the schedule â that I was going to get them to answer Menti polls, work in small groups and report back to the room. These are my established teaching styles and by halfway through the semester the students are well used to it. What they werenât prepared for was that in the end I wasnât going to tell them a ârightâ answer.
All the students I have worked on ethics with were somewhat disappointed when in the end they were not offered the ârightâ answer for the ethical dilemmas posed. What I did do though was still offer them a conclusion to their learning. I point out some of the excellent examples of consideration and thought offered by groups to highlight themes from the four principles. Itâs useful here too to point students to where theyâll apply their learning from the session in the short and long term. For my students their future projects all require ethics, inclusion and sustainability statements. Itâs important though to also evidence where the learning will go beyond the classroom.
There are examples of cases that in hindsight there are clear cases of ârightsâ and âwrongsâ (you can pull examples of fields relevant to you, often cited is the Challenger tragedy and Ford Pinto Memo). What we conclude on though is getting comfortable with a lot of decision making professionally being in the âmiddleâ â a complex space with multiple competing factors. Engineers need to work with the principles of ethics to guide us to make sound and well-informed judgements.
Itâs essential that tomorrowâs graduate engineers understand that ethics is not a âtack onâ statement at the end of a project proposal but rather that ethics is a core part of the role of an engineer. Using the Engineering Ethics Toolkit to help integrate ethics into the core of their education today is a very good way to do that. I recommend the Engineering Ethics Toolkit to all educators â the wealth of the resource cannot be understated in its support to a teacherâs session design and, most importantly, to a studentâs learning.
You can find out more about getting involved or contributing to the Engineering Ethics Toolkit here.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
The workshop showcased the Engineering Ethics Toolkit and introduced a pragmatic approach to integrating ethics content into teaching, using examples and a detailed and interactive curriculum map, which connects the elements of the toolkit.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
Do you want to champion the teaching of ethics within engineering?
Do you want to help shape the future of the Engineering Ethics Toolkit?
Do you need support with integrating ethics into your own engineering teaching?
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then you should join our new Ethics Ambassadors community.
Ethics Ambassadors was launched in March 2023 in order to expand and develop the work and recommendations of the Engineering Ethics Advisory Group, whose expertise and advocacy was instrumental during the creation and development of the Engineering Ethics Toolkit.
The aims of the Ethics Ambassadors community are:
to champion the teaching of ethics within engineering courses and modules;
to support educators integrating ethics teaching within engineering courses and modules;
to share best practice in engineering ethics teaching;
to identify and address needs within engineering ethics teaching;
to source, review, develop and publish new materials for the Engineering Ethics Toolkit.
An initial meeting of Ethics Ambassadors was held in June 2023 and we are currently in the process of nominating and voting for key roles within the community.
You can learn more about Ethics Ambassadors here.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
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.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
“In January 2022, GoodCorporation was tasked with undertaking a Review of Ethical Culture and Practices in UK engineering. The need for the review was one of several actions identified in a report by the Engineering Ethics Reference Group (EERG), whose remit is to provide leadership and advice to help develop an enhanced culture of ethical behaviour in UK engineering.
The overall objective was to develop a benchmark from which the UK engineering profession can periodically audit and report on ethical performance in UK engineering and identify areas for improvement in ethical culture and practice. The exercise would also allow benchmarking against other professions and identify relevant learnings from them.” – The Royal Academy of Engineering
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professorsâ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.