2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrating ethics in engineering education has now become a recurring item at engineering educational forums and discussions and is still growing in urgency. It is now no longer a question of whether ethics should be integral to curriculum design but how, who, what and why. How can it be incorporated? Who should be teaching ethics? What should we be teaching? And, more fundamentally, why are we teaching what we teach? The aim of this paper is to present how an internationally curated open source ‘Engineering Ethics Toolkit’ was developed by educators, for educators to embed ethical context within their courses and degrees, and to consider what could be examined further for future development of the toolkit. The engineering ethics toolkit provides guidance, resources, tools and frameworks for engineering educators at all levels of experience and roles in teaching ethics to engineers. It aims to answer the key questions mentioned above to integrate engineering ethics in curriculum design. The objectives of this paper are to a) explain the methodology of developing the engineering ethics toolkit b) present the metadata and user experience on how the toolkit is currently being used worldwide and c) identify future steps for the toolkit to develop further. The toolkit was co-created by a dedicated working group of educators from diverse higher education institutions: from new unconventional universities to traditional long-standing establishments and practicing engineers from various industries and businesses. The current toolkit content comprises of guidance, teaching resources (case studies and linked activities), an interactive curriculum map, and descriptions of practice. The toolkit was launched in February 2022 and the first steps of an impact assessment on the project are underway. Feeding into this assessment is metadata on the use of the website and toolkit, which is continually being collated. This includes collecting geographical and temporal data to identify regional interests in ethical topics and frequency of use to identify the level of focussed topics versus diverse topics. These will be used as a proxy for assessing regional relevance and urgency. Testimonials from four educators who have used toolkit resources in educational contexts have also been collected to evaluate the efficacy of the toolkit qualitatively. These user cases reflect both novice users introducing ethics and experienced educators’ use of the toolkit, which comprises of guidance articles and resources to build knowledge and structure for curriculum delivery. This initial phase of the impact assessment of the engineering ethics toolkit has shown that it also helps to support educators to achieve the directive from professional bodies to imbue ethics into engineering degrees. Further work will explore how the toolkit could evolve through the active participation of other engineering ethics educators as well as engineering students and graduates.