User-Centered Engineering Ethics Curricula

Ethical training in the classroom offers engineering students the opportunity to assess theoretical frameworks and consider crucial diverse perspectives that they can apply in the workplace. With practice, and exposure to decision-making processes supported by ethical theory, students can develop the agility to consider dilemmas from multiple ethical perspectives in order to make more astute decisions. Ethical theory in engineering applications exists in a diverse multicultural environment. It is important to design engineering ethics courses so that they are culturally sensitive and inclusive of the diverse students in the classroom. This preliminary study uses a short ethics course coupled with a student assessment survey to understand the diversity and perspectives operative in the engineering classroom. The goal is to design a student-centered engineering ethics curriculum and, eventually, a globally acceptable online engineering ethics course. Presented here are the survey data collected as evidence for substantiating diversity-warranted user-centered pedagogy in the engineering ethics curricula along with a framework for designing and implementing user-centered globally ethical curricula.