Engineering Commons^™

A Critical Realist Investigation Into The Development Of Engineering Ethics Education, Diana Adela Martin, Eddie Conlon, Brian Bowe

Research Papers

The paper reflects on the use of critical realism as a theoretical lens for examining the provision of ethics in engineering programmes and putting forward recommendations for the development of engineering ethics education. It is based on a large scale 4-year mixed methods study in which 23 engineering programmes from 6 higher education institutions in Ireland participated. The methods used include documentary analysis of programme documents, course syllabus and accreditation reports, interviews with instructors and members of accreditation panels, participant observation at accreditation events and a descriptive statistical analysis of the numerical grade used by engineering programmes to self-assess their …

Effect Of Engineering Education On Students’ Ethical Attitudes, Ulla-Talvikki Anniina Virta, Hannu-Matti Järvinen

Research Papers

Integrating teaching about ethics in engineering degree has challenges: Teachers focused on the degree core topics may lack the expertise to handle the ethics, and teachers with an ethics background may struggle to connect the ethics teaching to the field-specific issues. In addition, a portion of the students themselves may consider the non-core topic to be unnecessary or demotivating, which poses further challenges for the teaching. In the paper, we explore the ethical attitudes of students based on a survey conducted on information technology, electrical engineering and computer sciences students at our university.

The survey received 224 responses. We compare …

Civil And Architectural Engineering Students’ Conceptualization Of Good Engineering And Its Implications For Ethics Education, Madeline Polmear

Research Papers

The ways in which students conceptualise what it means to do good engineering illuminates their values and priorities and shapes their understanding of ethics in engineering. The present study is part of a larger project that is exploring civil and architectural engineering students’ understanding of ethical and societal responsibility and its development via formal and informal learning. Data collection and analysis are ongoing in the larger project, and the present study focuses on eight semi-structured interviews with civil and architectural engineering students at one university in Belgium. The analysis was designed to address how civil and architectural students conceptualise good …

A Multimodal Measurement Of The Impact Of Deepfakes On The Ethical Reasoning And Affective Reactions Of Students, Vivek Ramachandran, Cécile Hardebolle, Nihat Kotluk, Touradj Ebrahimi, Reinhard Riedl, Patrick Jermann, Roland Tormey

Research Papers

Deepfakes - synthetic videos generated by machine learning models - are becoming increasingly sophisticated. While they have several positive use cases, their potential for harm is also high. Deepfake production involves input from multiple engineers, making it challenging to assign individual responsibility for their creation. The separation between engineers and consumers may also contribute to a lack of empathy on the part of the former towards the latter. At present, engineering ethics education appears inadequate to address these issues. Indeed, the ethics of artificial intelligence is often taught as a stand-alone course or a separate module at the end of …