From Awareness to Action - Page 10 of 20

Recommendation 3: Integration of Topics within the Courses. It is vital that discussions of ethical and social issues flow naturally from and have connection with course topics. A simple "plug and play" approach of listing issues and pushing them into courses because they have to be covered would not be effective. Ideally, these topics should be tightly connected with the technical discussions, and the instructor should believe that they are important. Students quickly recognize what the instructor considers to be "important" material and what is "fluff".

The key to this integrated approach is in overall coordination of the curriculum. By providing students with the necessary background and analysis tools and skills in the introductory computing courses, they are then equipped to apply them to issues raised in the more advanced courses. This is analogous to assuming that students can apply the programming skills learned in their introductory courses throughout the rest of their CS courses. If the groundwork has been laid early, no subsequent course should have to spend an inordinate amount of time on ethics and social impact.

Recommendation 4: Maximum Coverage with Minimum Overlap. A curriculum-wide ethics and social responsibility program could be implemented simply by adopting a departmental policy of "make sure that you include a discussion of ethical and social issues in every class." This approach would meet the first two recommendations and could also meet the third one with careful planning. The danger is that this informal approach might result in the coverage of some topics repeatedly, causing students to be bored, while other important topics might never be brought up. Ensuring the inclusion of a maximum number of issues with the minimum of overlap requires careful planning across the curriculum. It is important to establish a framework across the curriculum that provides balance between the long-standing issues that need to be covered and rapidly breaking current events. There should be enough flexibility to allow discussion of new topics as they arise. Because students will have experience in thinking about, analyzing and discussing similar issues, they will have a more informed basis for examining the current topics.