This Ethics and Education in Science and Engineering award to Michigan Technological University (MTU) and the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA)will deliver ethics education to STEM graduate students using Web 2.0 technologies (blogs and wikis), mediated by content experts and delivered through the university library. Web 2.0 technologies offer two benefits compared to traditional classroom or programmed online instruction: they are asynchronous, which will enable graduate students, particularly those with English as a second language and demanding schedules, to participate in a relaxed and reflective manner, and they support an active, collaborative learning process to develop understanding of complex ethical concepts. In the first two years of this project, intellectual property and copyright experts will develop a web-based content library and engage diverse student teams at MTU in ethical problem-solving through online conversation and collaborative writing. In the third year of the project, the design will be replicated at UTPA, which is an Hispanic Serving Institution. A goal of the project is to demonstrate how university libraries can partner with offices of research integrity to improve responsible conduct of research (RCR). The infrastructure developed for this project - content library, exemplar problems, blogs and wikis - can be expanded to cover a full range of RCR issues. Moreover, there is potential to scale the infrastructure for asynchronous ethics education to multi-university consortia with a distributed network of content experts creating a community of practice in ethics education facilitated by university libraries.
