Co-constructing Shared Values and Ethical Practice for the Next Generation: Lessons Learned from a Curriculum on Information Ethics

TL;DR

This paper describes an online course in information ethics for STEM students that aims to raise awareness of societal impacts, promote ethical debate, and introduce Hegelian dialectics into STEM education.

Contribution

It presents the design, implementation, and lessons learned from a novel ethics curriculum integrating philosophical dialectics into STEM education.

Findings

Engaged over 2000 students worldwide in ethics debates

Highlighted the importance of societal impact awareness in STEM training

Demonstrated the effectiveness of philosophical tools in ethics education

Abstract

We present the motivation, design, outline, and lessons learned from an online course in scientific integrity, research ethics, and information ethics provided to over 2000 doctoral and engineering students in STEM fields, first at the University Paris-Saclay, and now expanded to an online MOOC available to students across the world, in English. Unlike a course in scientific domains, meant to provide students with methods, tools, and concepts they can apply in their future career, the goal of such a training is not so much to equip them, but to make them aware of the impact of their work on society, care about the responsibilities that befall on them, and make them realize not all share the same opinions on how should technology imprint society. While we provide conceptual tools, this is more to sustain interest and engage students. We want them to debate on concrete ethical issues and realize the difficulty of reconciling positions on contemporary dilemma such as dematerialized intellectual property, freedom of expression online and its counterparts, the protection of our digital selves, the management of algorithmic decision, the control of autonomous systems, and the resolution of the digital divide. As a bold shortcut, our course is about introducing and motivating Hegelian dialectics in STEM curricula, usually more bent on an Aristotelian perspective.