Engineering Students as Co-creators in an Ethics of Technology Course

Abstract

Research on the effectiveness of case studies in teaching engineering ethics in higher education is underdeveloped. To add to our knowledge, we have systematically compared the outcomes of two case approaches to an undergraduate course on the ethics of technology: a detached approach using real-life cases and a challenge-based learning (CBL) approach with students and stakeholders acting as co-creators (CC). We first developed a practical typology of case-study approaches and subsequently tested an evaluation method to assess the students’ learning experiences (basic needs and motivation) and outcomes (competence development) and staff interpretations and operationalizations, seeking to answer three questions: (1) Do students in the CBL approach report higher basic needs, motivation and competence development compared to their peers in the detached approach? (2) What is the relationship between student-perceived co-creation and their basic needs, motivation and competence development? And (3) what are the implications of CBL/CC for engineering-ethics teaching and learning? Our mixed methods analysis favored CBL as it best supported teaching and research goals while satisfying the students’ basic needs and promoting intrinsic motivation and communication competences. Competence progress in other areas did not differ between approaches, and motivation in terms of identified regulation was lower for CBL, with staff perceiving a higher workload. We propose that our case typology model is useful and that as a method to engage students as co-creators, CBL certainly merits further development and evaluation, as does our effectiveness analysis for engineering ethics instruction in general and for case-study approaches in particular.

Motivational dynamics in basic needs profiles: Toward a person‐centered motivation approach in engineering education

“…Oral feedback was organized in weekly coaching sessions (van Diggelen et al, 2019) to support students to give meaning to the process they went through. The number of respondents was too small to perform cluster analysis in the way we did in this article, but the analysis showed that a redesign based on the cluster analysis led to results for the entire group that was significantly better for competence, autonomy, and intrinsic motivation compared to the classical approach (G. Bombaerts et al, 2021).…”

A Multi-level Review of Engineering Ethics Education: Towards a Socio-technical Orientation of Engineering Education for Ethics

“…Co-teaching activities involving engineering and philosophy or social sciences instructors can address the problem of expertise and convey to students a message about the importance of this subject. Nevertheless, it is an expensive, time and labour-intensive approach, which requires long-term contact and research efforts (Bombaerts et al, 2021 ). Moreover, this approach is considered “second-rate academic work” (Taebi & Kastenberg, 2019 , p. 1768), and is not properly acknowledged in promotion and hiring schemes (National Academy of Engineering, 2017 , p. 12).…”

“…Nevertheless, despite the variety of teaching methods and the prevalence of case studies, there is limited empirical research that could elucidate the effectiveness of each teaching approach towards the attainment of clearly defined goals, as well as their impact on student engagement (Bagdasarov et al, 2013 ; Bombaerts et al, 2021 ; Martin et al, 2021 ; Thiel et al, 2013 , p. 267). There is also little known on how cases are presented in engineering ethics instruction and the kind of cases used (Yadav et al, 2007 ), how they should be taught (Davis & Yadav, 2014 , p. 172), and what approach serves the achievement of which learning goals (Romkey, 2015 ).…”

“…This should be complemented by researching the attainment of these goals, given that “ethical awareness has not been demonstrated to translate reliably into ethical behaviour” (Bairaktarova & Woodcock, 2017 , p. 1130). As pointed out by Martin et al ( 2021 ) and Bombaerts et al ( 2021 ), metrics of evaluating the effectiveness of different teaching approaches are still underdeveloped.…”

Enacting socio-technical responsibility through Challenge Based Learning in an Ethics and Data Analytics course

“…To address these challenges and encourage engineers to take their responsibilities to heart, engineering programmes need to familiarise students early with the features of a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) problem, that requires a mix of socio-technical skills. Such ill-structured learning activities [43,45] can offer students a deeper exposure to ethics and enhance their motivation to engage with ethical topics ( [27,28,32,[39][40][41]). They can also contribute to students' awareness of the varied ethical situations they might encounter in their practice or the type of responsibilities they can take on in their profession [29].…”