Incorporation of technology based aids for teaching engineering ethics

A two credit hour engineering ethics course has been added to the engineering curriculum at Brigham Young University. The course uses several technology based instructional techniques to aid the students learning. These include: a world wide web ethics site; electronic dialogues; internet access to related engineering ethics sites; interactive computer case-study modules; and case-study videos. The newly developed ethics site includes significant articles on basic Judeo-Christian values, references to copyrighted articles, and connections to other ethics based internet sites. Electronic dialogue facilities furnishes a powerful means to communicate by allowing students to thoughtfully consider an idea, and then express the idea in writing in a relatively nonthreatening environment. Such interchange is invaluable in ethics courses that require individual thinking, expression of ideas, and interchange of these ideas among the class. Several internet sites that exist on the world-wide-web, e.g. home-pages for the technical societies, provide additional sources of information on ethics. Teaching helps produced under the sponsorship of NSF and others, such as the Western-Michigan University interactive engineering ethics case study modules, and case study videos provide significant, realistic learning experiences. In a class evaluation, students have expressed positive feedback concerning these technological aids.