Using Active Learning and Critical Thinking to Identify and Apply Ethical Values in Engineering Education

Moving to a responsible engineering educational approach is a trend nowadays since the artifacts created by engineers have an impact on society and the environment. Ethics has become a key learning outcome value by many accreditation bodies, but ethics education can be implemented in many different ways. This paper advocates for an educational approach not only based on the introduction of stand-alone ethics courses but also on pouring values throughout the curriculum in any courses related to creating technologies. We describe here two examples of assignments that follow a microscale embedded ethics approach and active learning tasks to engage students in the exploration of biases and ethical issues concerning user interface design and data visualizations, respectively. The first example has a hidden goal of identifying gender-based biases in websites by applying reverse design thinking techniques on existing websites. The second example uses three different tasks to explore and apply ethics in data integration and visualizations by designing multisensorial visualizations that could serve more diverse audiences, applying value-based design in a final project, and elaborating an essay on existing unethical AI-based tools. Both experiences, which students appreciated, helped to raise awareness of ethical issues and the responsibility of computer science engineers.