A Feasibility Study for inclusion of Ethics and Social issues in Engineering and Design Coursework in Australia

This paper reports on a feasibility study on including ethics and social issues in the current curriculum of a school of engineering and information technology in an Australian university. The study has three goals: first, to understand the current status of inclusion of ethics and social issues in engineering courses. Second, to understand the willingness of staff within the school to include ethics and societal issues in their courses. Third, to understand the opportunities and challenges for inclusion of ethical and societal issues in the coursework. Our methods include interviews with school staff and subject matter experts as well as analyses of textual artifacts such as course outlines, course readings, student assignments, and accreditation reports. The analysis of textual artifacts runs partially via an automated text analyzer that search for words that have ethical connotation, such as safety, responsibility, privacy, harm, etcetera in the dataset of course materials. A manual (human) analysis of the coursework was done for those courses that give insufficient results in the automated text analyzer. We looked for opportunities to include ethics and societal issues in coursework. The conclusion is that there is general consensus amongst staff that ethics and societal issues deserve more attention in the school. At the same time, there is concern that including ethics and societal issues takes away valuable teaching time for technical material. There is preference for an integrated way of ethics teaching, rather than one seperate engineering ethics course.