Everyone:

Welcome to EG 44175 Ethical and Professional Issues in Engineering, which is a course where the goal is to get you to think about the ethical and moral issues surrounding engineering and technology, along with your responsibilities as a Notre Dame engineer. Unlike most of your Engineering classes, there will be no programming, design work, experiments, or even math. Rather the course will revolve around reading and writing and discussion; it will be more similar to what you find in Arts and Letters than in Engineering or Science.

Course Overview

As you can see from the course schedule, we will be going through a variety of ethical and professional issues and topics related to engineering including:

To enable robust class discussions, there is a daily reading assignment where you are expected to read articles, watch videos, or listen to podcasts, and then take a quiz that includes one or more reflection writing prompts (the first reading is below).

To encourage creative expression and different modes of communication, you will also be expected to work on two group projects. Each of these projects will require you to reflect on the issues and topics discussed in class and to produce a group artifact such as a video or podcast. Further explanation on these group projects will be provided in the future.

At the end of the course, there is a final exam which will consist of questions from the daily reading quizzes along with some reflection writing prompts.

Readings

The readings for the first day of class revolve around broadly exploring what ethics means in the context of engineering and what it means to be a Notre Dame engineer:

  1. Engineering Ethics: The Conversation without End

  2. A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions

  3. Seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching

  4. Parable of the Talents

Slack

If you find a relevant article or video, please share them in the Slack channel for everyone to see.

Quiz

Once you have performed the readings, you are to take the quiz below by 6:00 AM of the morning the reading is assigned (ie. it is due before class).

Reading Quiz