Ethics - knowing what's morally right or unjust - is essential in a world increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.

Which means teaching ethics has gotten even more complicated.

WHO'S TACKLING THE PROBLEM?

HOW? Funded by a National Science Foundation grant for $750,000, the team is focused on

  • Improving the way that ethics is taught in STEM classes
  • Helping students understand the ethical implications of their work in STEM fields
  • Sharing the findings of the project with other universities

WHAT'S NEXT? The team hosted a two-day workshop, CCE STEM, where international guests presented on topics like ethical use of generative artificial intelligence and building ethical tech identities with undergraduate students.

Here are five of our favorite takeaways from the workshop!

Amanda Kellogg, Radford University

In terms of impact, I've been really inspired and energized, because it is so exciting to see people working on a really important issue from such an incredible range of perspectives and topics. There are people here who are in engineering education, but we're also talking about AI and people in faculty development, it's just great to see a group of people come together.

In terms of a thing I will be taking away, I'm looking forward to going back and thinking with my colleagues about how ethics is something that can be infused, throughout a curriculum throughout a students’ college experience, even beyond the classroom. 

Daniel Garzón, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

And the thing that I love -- we share the same problems. And because of the state-of-the-art is in the kind of beginning, we have more questions in common than answers. So that makes me feel really happy that I'm not in a really ‘forgotten place of the world.’ Because we actually think that USA is ahead with different knowledge of everything and technology, and sometimes it is that way. But in this case, I think that we have more problems and questions than answers at this moment. 

It's because we suffer the same problems. What do we do when I set an essay, and students use ChatGPT? How do we market this? How do we avoid it? How do we use it? Because eventually I can’t avoid it and say, ‘Don’t use that.’ So, we received some techniques, some ideas that we have to test, and see what will work. 

Inés Direito, University College London, Centre for Engineering Education

I think [the conference] is really inspiring because this event brings different perspectives from different backgrounds, different contexts of ethics education. I think it's really important to have the diversity of perspectives. In terms of take away and things that I will implement in my practice; because I'm more research driven in what I do, I think I'll be really interested in doing some work specifically with our dear colleague, Diana Bairaktarova, on, you know, empathy and ethics of care. That's something that I will definitely want to pursue in more depth in the future. I think we’ve had loads of interesting presentations about that during these past two days. 

David Lopez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech)

So, I really enjoyed the workshop. I think it was balanced; I mean, we have a lot of research papers and ideas, but also a list of tools to incorporate, and some ideas that push me to think about things that I was doing and saying, okay, maybe this a good way of doing things. Or I need to read that paper or to get in touch with that person.

What I will bring with me back, apart from new friendships and relationships with a lot of good people and the pleasure to be here again, is some ideas. I mean, I think my bag is absolutely full of ideas and things that I want to think about. And maybe to ask people that I met here and say, OK, let's talk about this because I've been thinking about this. And I need more information. I need more. And sometimes you need time! 

Vladimir Macko, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland

We are working on ethical questions in Switzerland, in Europe too, but it's very nice to have a project already after six years in a very advanced stage.

It's a nice reference for us and also Virginia Tech is a large institution, so we have studied it at a large scale...one of the things which I would be taking home is the question of how we could apply this to European universities? Can we use the similar survey tools and establish some sort of comparison at the Swiss Institute of Technology?

I would be very interested to see how we would compare and how we would potentially use the same evaluation tools, because we have heard that some students perform in ethical questions average or above average or below. There are very relevant topics which we could consider if we want to make the comparators study or follow up collaborations.