Learning Outcomes and Assessments for Ethical Computing

ABSTRACTThe inclusion of computing ethics and social impact curricula in computer science programs has received increasing attention in research and teaching. While students explicitly interested in the topic may choose to take courses designed only to teach ethical thinking in computer science, we have a societal need to "teach ethics" in a wider variety of computing courses. With the powerful tools that we give students comes responsibility, and students should know how to consider ethical implications of the things they build. The difficulty of developing strategies to "teach ethics" in computing courses is that 1) teaching computing ethics is different than teaching other computational courses, requiring more than the simple transmission of information or knowledge 2) we lack a way to assess the efficacy of the strategies we use to accomplish the "more." We aim to foster a discussion on the current research and instructional approaches, led by researchers who are actively teaching responsible computer science and data science in a variety of institutional settings (e.g., private, public, small, large, etc.). In addition to forming new research and teaching collaborations, we hope this discussion will inspire the larger community of computer science educators to embed computing ethics and social impact in their technical courses.