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There is a lack of access to critical knowledge on machine ethics and the impacts of technology on individuals and communities in everyday life. This project pioneers an inclusive curriculum design process to broaden accessibility to machine ethics education. Our approach uses a ''source'' course to develop materials for seven "target" courses. The source course is a machine ethics curriculum development course in which students and faculty collaboratively build curricular materials for integration into non-computer science courses. Here we describe the development of the ''source'' course using a curriculum co-creation process that leverages student and faculty expertise. The process emphasizes an inclusive design approach, rooted in continuous stakeholder feedback and consistent, transparent communication. The products of this process include course materials that incorporate underrepresented ethical frameworks. Additionally, it features peer-reviewed journal assignments that promote reflective learning and sharing of diverse perspectives, as well as a final module project in which students collaborate with faculty to co-create curricular materials. Our approach aims to broaden a culturally relevant understanding of ethical challenges in technology while ensuring that the curriculum resonates with diverse student backgrounds. Our presentation will describe key insights about the process and products of our curriculum design.
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Designing Ethically-Integrated Assignments: It’s Harder Than it Looks
While the CS education community has successfully incorporated tech-ethics assignments and modules into computing courses, we lack a defined process for instructional design to create these materials from scratch across the curriculum. To enable the development of such a process, we explore two research questions: (1) What specific instructional design challenges emerge when creating ethically-integrated assignments for CS courses? And (2) what strategies might overcome them? We address these questions using Research through Design, a method for critically examining design processes. Applying this method to our own process of creating ethics-integrated CS assignments yielded four key challenges: identifying an ethical context, maintaining a technical focus, eliciting both ethical and technical thinking from students, and making the assignment practical for the classroom. Further, the Research through Design approach revealed process-level insights for addressing these challenges, which can apply across the computing curriculum. This paper also serves as a case study of Research through Design for CS education, highlighting the importance of the instructional design process and the behind-the-scenes challenges and design decisions that go into tech-ethics materials.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2041960
- PAR ID:
- 10486344
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1
- ISBN:
- 9781450399760
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 177 to 190
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ethics, responsible computing, instructional design, research through design
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Chicago IL USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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