A part of 5.2 Lightning Talk session

Diane Horton, Professor, Teaching Stream, Computer Science, FAS
David Liu, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Computer Science, FAS
Sheila McIlraith, Computer Science, Professor, and Associate Director, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

In this session, we will share a pedagogy we have developed to embed ethical considerations into courses in our discipline, computer science. Training students to identify and reason about ethical issues is important well beyond computer science, and indeed universities have for many years incorporated ethics into their curricula in fields such as biology, medicine and engineering. Rather than separate ethics education in dedicated, and perhaps optional, courses, the embedded approach integrates ethics into other courses in the discipline. Students are exposed to ethical considerations at the moment when they are learning discipline-specific material, and have the opportunity to engage in discussions about ethics at multiple points in their degree. We will describe the pedagogical strategies we have employed in ethics modules we developed for five courses spanning first year to graduate level — strategies that would be relevant to ethical discussions in any discipline. We have delivered modules to over 2,000 students so far. Both our experience in the classroom and our early formal assessment indicate that these modules have a significant impact on students’ attitudes about ethics, and their confidence in their ability to identify, discuss, and take action on ethical issues in the context of their future career.