2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

We have witnessed the emergence of new technologies that solve problems and make our life better. The use of new technologies has dramatically changed social conditions, and its rapid rate is causing a number of new problems and important new questions to emerge that test our values. The emergence of email gives us the ability to send messages to people all over the world instantly, but it also creates phishing attacks that steal financial information. The World Wide Web provides us access to a vast amount of information on all kinds of topics, but it also allows children to follow links to pornographic websites. It gives us a good reason why we need to make ethical decisions, weighing the benefits and potential harms associated with the use of new technology.

As many issues in computer science depend on persona and identity, it is critical that every individual working in this area must have an acceptable level of ethical awareness and sensitivity, and they must be able to make an ethical decision whenever they face an issue. To achieve this, we need to teach computer and information ethics to students from undergraduate programs, along with theories and technologies in computer sciences. Recent research shows us that ethics education improves students’ ethical awareness and sensitivity as well as moral reasoning. Currently, many undergraduate programs in computer science teach computer ethics within or outside of a department. However, delivery methods, teaching styles, topics covered, credit hours, target audiences, and instructors' expertise vary. There is an urgent need to know the status of undergraduate education for ethics, but most of the available resources are outdated.

To address the need, in this paper, we create an ontology for ethics in computer science by researching existing textbooks and research papers. We survey seventy undergraduate computer science programs in the United States using the ontology and analyze the status of undergraduate education on ethics, which includes the most and least covered topics, ethics as a dedicated course, credit hours, levels of ethics courses, ethics as a mandatory or optional course. Based on the analyzed results, we discuss the limitations of current education and suggest future direction.