Effective incorporation of ethics into courses that focus on programming

Abstract

This paper discusses some of the issues involved in incorporating ethics material into programming courses. Incorporating ethics into such courses raises particular challenges because of the time-intensive nature of the courses and because of the difficulty of finding material that is both relevant to the course and comprehensible to the students. The paper presents four case studies that we have used successfully when incorporating ethics material into our own programming courses.

Can We Help Information Systems Students Improve Their Ethical Decision Making?

“…Students need to learn to consider the issue from the point of view of different stakeholders. Califf and Goodwin (2005) have used the same scenario used in the first dilemma (Spinello, 2003) with students in a programming course and asked them to consider the issue from the point of view of the programmer of the software who would not be receiving any royalties.…”

Contextual integration

“…Common approaches include 1) a separate course on computer ethics and professional issues, 2) discussions of ethics and professional issues integrated across existing courses, including subject-specific courses, or 3) a senior-level capstone course [34]. Most often the approach taken is to provide a separate course [2,6,42], although occasionally one will encounter a program in which ethics is integrated across a range of computer science courses [10,20].…”