Teaching Ethics & Activism in a Human-Computer Interaction Professional Master's Program

Abstract

We report on a new ethics course for industry-bound students in a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) professional master's program. The goal is to prepare students to think critically about the technology they design and to drive ethical change within their future organizations. Unlike research-oriented graduate programs, students in professional master's programs primarily seek to enter industry, oftentimes making a career change from a non-computing area. Thus, in addition to supporting students' ethical reasoning skills, ethics pedagogy needs to also help students develop core skills in the technical discipline and be grounded in real-world situations to align with their practice-based goals. To achieve this, we structure our course around three principles: survey (introducing contemporary ethical issues in computing and their social context), stakeholders (considering the multi-faceted nature of ethical decision-making), and skills (developing the technical and communication skills needed to drive ethical change). We hope that our curriculum and reflections will help other instructors connect ethics pedagogy to professional practice in the classroom.