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Teaching an Online Ethics Course to Civil Engineering Students -
Steve Starrett

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 0629443. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Background

CE 790 is an engineering ethics course for graduate students. To help prepare students for the inevitable ethical dilemmas they will confront as professional engineers, this course was entirely devoted to analyzing real-life case studies. My goal was to give students training and practice in critiquing ethical scenarios, as well as to provide them with a systematic ethical decision-making framework they can use for the rest of their careers. | Implementation

Implementation

As an online course, all interaction occurred via the Internet. I first showed students a PowerPoint presentation to give them background on ethical decision-making. I then provided students with 14 unique, real-life ethical scenarios and asked them to analyze them following a rubric I provided with the initial assignment.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

The repeated use of case analyses allowed students to master the skill of thoroughly analyzing ethical dilemmas. Student papers tended to improve from D- and C-level work to A-level work by the end of the semester.

| Reflections

Reflections

Next time I teach this course I’d like to find ways for students to interact with their classmates; the fact that students currently work independently and at their own pace makes this challenging. I also plan to adjust the rubric to better represent the characteristics of excellent performance; this would increase the alignment between the grade I assign and the rubric I give students to guide their work.

| Summary

Project Summary

A civil engineering professor used case studies to give graduate students practice in critiquing ethical scenarios and to provide students with a decision-making framework they can use throughout their careers.