Within engineering departments, one of the most feared courses is engineering ethics. Viewed by many as complete wastes of time and in many cases boring these courses do well to hold up a boring core curriculum. I will attempt to discuss some of the issues with current ways of teaching engineering ethics and follow with some possible solutions.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of engineering ethics courses is the inherent lack of realism. Pursuing engineering ethics within the realm of theory is pointless. Engineers are not, for the most part, people who deal well with theory without corresponding application (this statement also ignores the fact that it is hard to distill ethics down to theoretical concepts). To that end case studies are a must and a fantastic starting point to any engineering ethics course. As we saw in class, they provide excellent starting points for discussion and pose true to life questions. While analyzing and discussing case studies provide a good basis for the class more thought needs to be put in to what else compliments this.
Internships come to mind, but it is incredibly hard to link this to a class, especially engineering ethics. Situations in which difficult ethical dilemmas are presented cannot be fabricated. I believe that speakers in industry who have had to deal with these types of issues could be useful. These would mostly be managers who have to make decisions on behalf of teams of engineers. Finally writing opinion papers on given case studies would cause students, even those less prone to participate in discussion, to genuinely consider these situations. This could be further enhanced by having students choose case studies that relate to their major or concentration. Finally, I believe that engineering ethics courses should be taught at the end of the student’s course progression. This guarantees that students are exposed to the full range of their topic before considering the ethical issues surrounding it.
While all of these ideas in no way guarantee a successful engineering ethics course, I believe they serve as possible improvements.
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