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This is a full Innovative Practice paper. Engineering professionals are increasingly called on to serve as “public welfare watchdogs” by paying heed to ways in which complex technologies can impact society and intervening when ethical issues arise. Though it is a goal of engineering education to train engineers to recognize and understand their responsibilities to the safety, health, and welfare of the public, research suggests that students are inadequately prepared to address such issues in practice. To address this concern, we designed and piloted a course module for electrical engineering master’s students to help them better address their public welfare responsibilities. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the course module, including reflection prompts, in-class presentations, breakout group activities, discussion prompts, and post-class assignments. We also present results from our pilot, including a summary of student responses to the reflection and discussion prompts and an overview of students’ course feedback. 

Postindustrial societies are characterized by complex technological objects and systems. The publics therein are increasingly reliant on engineers to take public welfare into account when designing and maintaining these objects and systems and raise awareness when public welfare is threatened. The training engineers receive in their engineering undergraduate education is thus expected to foster their sense of responsibility to public welfare, but such training may be absent or insufficient. In this paper, we draw on a survey of 120 employed engineers in the US to assess the extent to which they received formal public responsibility training in their undergraduate education and to assess the relationships between this training and their response to one of four randomly assigned ethical dilemmas. We find that engineers who reported receiving training in public welfare responsibilities as undergraduate students felt better prepared to address public welfare issues than those who had not received such training. Individuals with training in public welfare responsibilities were less likely to identify the ethical dilemma as irrelevant to their work, indicate that such dilemmas happen all the time, be uncomfortable reporting the issue, and believe that their colleagues might respect them less if they report. These findings have implications for improving engineering ethics education and ethical conduct trainings within engineering practice more broadly.