A Short Online Course Targeting Professionalism, the Impact of Engineering on Society and the Environment, and Ethics and Equity

Abstract

Understanding the role and responsibilities of Professional Engineers is of immediate relevance to those who aspire to enter the profession. These obligations most prominently manifest themselves in three of the twelve graduate attributes: Professionalism; the Impact of engineering on society and the environment; and Ethics and equity. Following an analysis of the curriculum map of programs that was performed as part of the CEAB-mandated Continual Improvement process at McGill University, it was concluded that our students could benefit from additional training in the aforementioned three graduate attributes. To this end, a required, 0-credit, online course was created to further expose and train Engineering students in all programs on these three important topics. The present paper will i) review the motivation behind the creation of this new course, ii) describe the evolution of its format and design, and iii) discuss the course’s contents and implementation.