Challenge-based learning to improve the quality of engineering ethics education

The SEFI 2021 annual conference committee provided me the opportunity to publish this text based on the SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award. I am happy to use this opportunity to sketch the Engineering Ethics Education (EEE) and Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) research I have been doing the last seven years. I will focus here on the redesign of a large first-year’s course for ethics and history of technology as an example. I will conclude with expressing my confidence that the dynamic communities working on for CBL and EEE can tackle the future challenges I list here.</p

Basic need frustration in motivational redesign of engineering courses

Engineering Education aims at realizing students’ satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. However, students’ frustration is never fully banned. In this article, I argue that one of the reasons for the limited focus on frustration in Engineering Education is the limited focus on frustration in classical motivational theory itself. I focus on Self-Determination Theory and distinguish between the early work focussing on satisfaction and the recent work considering frustration as a distinct active threat. I will complement this theoretical approach with an empirical analysis of data from a large ethics of technology course in 2016 and 2020 at Eindhoven University of Technology. Two research questions are asked: “(RQ1) Do basic needs satisfactions and frustrations in the USE basic course confirm the asymmetrical pattern described in recent literature?”; and “(RQ2) Do basic needs frustrations add to the variance of motivation types?” I performed principal axis factoring with an oblique rotation to answer RQ1 and stepwise regression analyses to answer RQ2. I conclude that basic need frustration can be measured as a clearly different concept compared to satisfaction and that splitting these two concepts is helpful for Engineering Education when studying motivation. I discuss two main avenues for Engineering Education: motivational theories should take need profiles and need trajectories into account in course design; and motivational research should inquire how individuals can learn to cope adaptively with need-frustrating experiences.</p

Does entrepreneurship belong in the academy? Revisiting the idea of the university

Academic entrepreneurship is a contentious university activity, but there is little engagement in the relevant literature with the idea of the university itself. References and assumptions about the role of universities in society are barely made explicit even though the centuries-old development of the idea of the university carries great insights. In this paper, we consider some of the deep tensions between instrumentalist and idealist views about the role of universities and argue that there is space for academic entrepreneurship, not merely as an add-on, but as an integral part of university activity. By formulating a research-oriented vision of academic entrepreneurship, we hope to guard the university from the dominance of other interests and goals and thus argue that an attractive form of academic entrepreneurship is possible

Ethics is a disempowered subject in the engineering curriculum

Power, as enacted in educational practices, is a critical issue that shapes all aspects of engineering education. Yet, there is little research within engineering education on how power manifests itself in what we teach and how we teach it. In this paper we use engineering ethics education as an exemplar to interrogate how power tacitly influences the practice of engineering ethics education. To infer the status of engineering ethics as an academic subject we examine, theorize, and elaborate on two aspects of power: (1) the internal power relations affecting the education of engineering ethics and how they manifest within engineering institutions, and (2) the exerting power of key external actors in and ways in which they impact engineering ethics education. Our methodological approach relies on autoethnographic data rooted in the perspective of the three authors. The autoethnographic cases are grounded in the authors’ own teaching and research practices in engineering ethics education set in the US, Irish and Dutch context. We perform a cross-comparative analysis to reflect further on the impact of power relations on ethics as an academic subject and make recommendations for engineering ethics education research and practice

Ethics is a disempowered subject in the engineering curriculum

Power, as enacted in educational practices, is a critical issue that shapes all aspects of engineering education. Yet, there is little research within engineering education on how power manifests itself in what we teach and how we teach it. In this paper we use engineering ethics education as an exemplar to interrogate how power tacitly influences the practice of engineering ethics education. To infer the status of engineering ethics as an academic subject we examine, theorize, and elaborate on two aspects of power: (1) the internal power relations affecting the education of engineering ethics and how they manifest within engineering institutions, and (2) the exerting power of key external actors in and ways in which they impact engineering ethics education. Our methodological approach relies on autoethnographic data rooted in the perspective of the three authors. The autoethnographic cases are grounded in the authors’ own teaching and research practices in engineering ethics education set in the US, Irish and Dutch context. We perform a cross-comparative analysis to reflect further on the impact of power relations on ethics as an academic subject and make recommendations for engineering ethics education research and practice