2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the past few years, the world has witnessed the steady proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools into all sectors and industries, even as we continue to grapple with the many ethical considerations and challenges this emergent technology brings with it. As it is becoming increasingly clear that the world is moving into a GAI-driven future, there is a strong necessity for training engineering graduates and future industry professionals into the ethical usage of GAI.

Towards this end, we developed and taught a 10-week college course on considerations and ethical challenges in using GAI tools within the user-centered design process. This course was developed by the lead author, a doctoral student at an R1 university researching this topic, and taught across the department’s BS and MS programs in consecutive quarters. The course afforded students the ability to practice the usage of GAI tools at various stages within the user-centered design process, discuss whether and how the use of such tools either benefited or hindered their workflows, consider the ethical considerations and challenges in every decision to engage with GAI, and build safeguards to avoid doing harm through their use of GAI. Students were exposed to various ethical dilemmas within GAI usage, such as identifying when GAI tools might produce disproportionately poor and harmful outcomes towards historically marginalized populations, when there might be mismatches between GAI outputs and user needs, and when GAI usage might be inappropriate given specific design conditions and target populations. In particular, the course sought to empower students with little to no coding/CS experience in enacting change within GAI usage policies, countering the popular rhetoric that GAI issues are inherently technical and therefore need technical knowledge to overcome.

In this paper, we will present the findings from teaching this course through semi-structured interviews with students, analyzed through thematic analysis techniques. Conducted after the completion of the course, interviews inquired into student experiences with course materials and how their own practices were affected through their participation. Since a lot of the students pursued summer internships in the field of GAI immediately after their participation in the course, we also asked whether they applied any of the insights gleaned from the course in their various internship positions.

At this stage, we have obtained preliminary insights from students and, based on positive responses, are offering an expanded 5-credit version of the course to undergraduate students across departments. The full paper will include details about the course, student reactions and narratives on incorporating course concepts into their praxes, and opportunities for future iterations of the course.