Duffour, Bell, Soklay, and Haklay paper at fPET-2010

1. Teaching ethics to engineers:
bringing academics on board
Philippe Duffour, Sarah Bell, Christian Solberg and
Muki Haklay
UCL
fPET 2010
Golden, Colorado

2. Engineering academics and ethics
• UCL curriculum context
• Ethics toolkit evaluation
• Staff responses to teaching engineering ethics

3. Civil and Environmental Degree Programme
Structure
• Major reforms 2006
• Clusters
– Tools
– Mechanisms
– Change
– Context
• Scenarios
• Tutorials

4. Ethics in the UCL Curriculum
• Ethics learning outcomes covered in ‘context
cluster’
– Professional issues
– Social context
– Sustainable development
• Royal Academy of Engineering Ethics Curriculum
Map
• Ethics toolkit for UCL academics 2009

5. Ethics toolkit
• Extended learning outcomes
• Integrating ethics in curriculum
– Tutorials, lectures, scenarios, new
courses
• Resources for staff
– Case studies
– Codes of conduct
– Reading lists

6. Evaluation of ethics teaching and toolkit
1. Are engineering academics engaged in
engineering ethics?
2. Are engineering academics interested in
teaching ethics?
3. What is the best way to teach ethics in our
department?
4. Is our toolkit effective?

7. Research method
• Independent research student
• Anonymous interviews with staff
• 13 of 36 responded so far
– In progress
– Self-selecting
• Qualitative analysis and coding

8. Major themes
• What is ethics?
• Personal ethics
• Why teach ethics?
• How best to teach ethics?

9. …the engineering profession needs to sort of
stand up for non-financial values, you know,
on honesty, health and safety, fairness.

10. What is ethics?
• Social purpose of
engineering
• Environmental values
• Sustainability
• Fairness
• Bribery and corruption
• Codes of conduct
• Big questions and everyday
interactions

11. Personal ethics
• Career paths
• Military research
• Research partners
• Research ethics
• Few direct ethical
dilemmas

12. …it’s probably more reprehensible to send
out an engineer without ethical thinking than
it is without mathematical thinking.

13. Why teach ethics?
• Essential
• Develop critical reasoning
• Good decision making
throughout a career
• Students bring an ethical
framework from their families
and background
• Teaching ethics by example
• Teaching ethics is difficult

14. …what you need to do is make the staff
conscious of ethical issues. I think it’s more
important to make the staff aware so they can
then incorporate it in their teaching where
appropriate.

15. How to best teach ethics?
• Integrated rather than separate course
– Crowded curriculum
• Core curriculum, not only tutorials
• Lectures largely ineffective
– Case studies
– Projects
– Personal examples
• Poor uptake of the toolkit

16. Conclusions
• Academics broadly understand engineering ethics
• Personal experience of ethics is framed in
research practice
• Teaching ethics is important but difficult
• Incorporate ethics into existing activities
• Engineering ethics toolkit has not been utilised