Incorporating Ethics in Computing Courses: Perspectives from Educators

TL;DR

This paper surveys computing educators to understand their attitudes towards integrating ethics into curricula, identifying barriers and support structures to enhance ethics education in higher computing courses.

Contribution

It provides insights into educators' perspectives on ethics integration, highlighting barriers and proposing support structures to facilitate ethics inclusion in computing education.

Findings

Educators are generally positive about including ethics.

Several barriers hinder ethics integration in courses.

Support structures can promote ethics inclusion.

Abstract

Incorporating ethics into computing education has become a priority for the SIGCSE community. Many computing departments and educators have contributed to this endeavor by creating standalone computing ethics courses or integrating ethics modules and discussions into preexisting curricula. In this study, we hope to support this effort by reporting on computing educators' attitudes toward including ethics in their computing classroom, with a special focus on the structures that hinder or help this endeavor. We surveyed 138 higher education computing instructors to understand their attitudes toward including ethics in their classes, what barriers might be preventing them from doing so, and which structures best support them. We found that even though instructors were generally positive about ethics as a component of computing education, there are specific barriers preventing ethics from being included in some computing courses. In this work, we explore how to alleviate these barriers and outline support structures that could encourage further integration of ethics and computing in higher education.