This project in the Science and Society, Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology Program will establish an online environment to enable the sharing of best practices in ethics instruction. The resulting Ethics Across the Curriculum (EAC) Toolkit will take advantage of innovations in software development effectively used by computer programmers to collaborate, such as open source code, and an existing open courseware tool (Connexions). The EAC Toolkit will provide an online platform that facilitates integrated access, collaborative creation, continual improvement, and interactive dissemination of EAC resources and instructional best practices. It will include resources authored by and collaboratively developed through the EAC community. It will also generate meta-knowledge as members of the EAC community share insights gained by using EAC resources. By featuring a robust interactive element, the Toolkit will add value to current and future websites, books, papers, cases, and activities. Because the Toolkit will serve as a continuous virtual retreat/workshop, it will build an online community where engineering, science, business and ethics educators can come together, interact, and collaborate. Updating, refining and expanding the Toolkit EAC materials will become self-sustaining processes as the supporting EAC community is formed and solidified by the very Toolkit it will come to sustain. The Toolkit will have a broad impact on teaching professional and practical ethics. It will: foster the identification, generation, and dissemination of EAC best practices into the teaching and professional communities; enhance the infrastructure for research and education by expanding upon the available resources dedicated to EAC and by creating inter-institutional and interdisciplinary communities and partnerships; lead to the formation and solidification of communities of Business, Science and Engineering (BSE) faculty and practitioners committed to the integration of ethics into BSE curricula and practices; and document continuous improvement in the generation and implementation of EAC resources that respond to the accreditation requirements of agencies such as the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the Middle States Commission of Higher Education, and other professional and regional accreditation organizations. The intellectual merit of this proposal consists in its potential to: employ, refine, and evaluate community-based dissemination and assessment; develop an organic, evolving EAC repository; contribute to and refine educational technology; provide new insights into EAC pedagogy; and enhance the teaching of professional ethics and contribute to its intellectual development. The EAC Toolkit will provide a robust educational infrastructure, which will empower BSE professors as ethics mentors and provide them with renewable materials to carry out this role.
