Enacting socio-technical responsibility through Challenge Based Learning in an Ethics and Data Analytics course

This Research Full Paper reports on a study conducted at a Dutch technological university, which examined how students engage with societal aspects in a Challenge-Based Learning course on Ethics and Data Analytics. Responsibility is a core concept for engineering ethics, yet there is still little known about how to best foster responsibility and the impact of different pedagogical approaches on engineering students’ development of professional responsibility. In the E3Challenge2 course offered by TU Eindhoven in 2021, students worked in groups to develop solutions for smart-grid, smart-health or smart-mobility challenges. These challenges were put forward by real stakeholders from the university’s ecosystem, taking on the role of a client. The study aims to explore how students understand their professional responsibility when having to develop a socio-technical solution to a real case brought by a real client. Our analysis is based on interviews with 19 students enrolled in this course in the spring of 2021. The study’s preliminary findings show that the CBL format fostered a broad understanding of professional responsibility in the course’s deliverables, which included micro and macroethical understandings. Supporting learning activities include stakeholder mapping, participatory practices, foresight exercises or value sensitive design.