Compendium of Best Practices
Introduction to the project and research on ethics education
This compendium presents a group of representative challenges as well as best practice cases in ethics education at higher education institutions (HEIs) and ethics training in the technology sector in Europe. The challenges and best practice cases were identified through the focus group meetings and semi-structured interviews conducted in Turkey, Greece and Germany within the framework of the ETHICS4CHALLENGES project. ETHICS4CHALLENGES (Innovative Ethics Education for Major Technological and Scientific Challenges) is a 3-year project co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme, run by four partners from Europe:
- Middle East Technical University (METU), Türkiye (Coordinator)
- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Greece
- European University Viadrina (EUV, Germany
- European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology (ESST), Belgium
ETHICS4CHALLENGES is an initiative to address contemporary ethical challenges that emerge as a result of the contemporary scientific and technological advances through flexible ethics education pathways. By means of the flexible ethics education pathways it aims to inculcate ethical awareness in academic and relevant non-academic sectors as well as to foster critical thinking about science and technology in a way that advances core European values such as democracy, human dignity, autonomy and solidarity.
The internalization of EU values by the young generation of researchers, scientists and engineers who will be shaping the sphere of technology and its interaction with society, requires a thorough and ongoing education based on a transdisciplinary and pluralistic approach. Research conducted by the ETHICS4CHALLENGES consortia has revealed that the field of science and technology ethics education faces numerous challenges, with institutional capacity emerging as arguably the most critical concern. In many European universities there is a pressing need for ethics of science and technology courses, particularly in engineering and science faculties, driven by the rapid production of new technologies. The discrepancy between, on the one hand, this need and, on the other, the existing, available instructors and courses of ethics of science and technology is such that it exceeds the capacity of individual faculties and institutions to fulfill it. A similar discrepancy is apparent in the non-academic sector too, characterized by the lack of ethico-legal frameworks, guiding documents and training programs to address concrete cases of contemporary challenges. The project consortium believes that integrating ethics components into existing education and training contexts through concepts like modularity and flexibility would be more effective in bridging the gap. Thus, their goal is to develop flexible education pathways that can be readily utilized by university instructors, students, researchers, government institutions, and companies alike.
The project focuses on three major fields to be examined from a techno-ethical perspective: a) environmental degradation, b) biomedicalization c) digitalization. Yet, it does not distinguish between scientific disciplines (engineering, sciences, social sciences and humanities) in terms of its target groups when it comes to the promotion of flexible ethics education pathways.
This compendium is the outcome of a series of research activities (international workshop, focus group studies and interviews on ethics education) carried out in Türkiye, Greece and Germany under Work Package 2 (WP2). The sectors that have been explored for this purpose are academia and the non-academic sector (businesses, governments, scientific associations and professional organizations, NGOs).
METHODOLOGY
On 27-28 April 2023 an international workshop on Best Practices and Obstacles in Ethics Education for Technological and Scientific Challenges. The workshop consisted of various sessions focusing on education in science and technology ethics from the perspective of different stakeholders such as university representatives, research institutions, scientific and professional associations, governmental and regulatory agencies. Representatives of stakeholders from around Europe as well as partners of the ETHICS4CHALLENGES project presented and discussed their experiences and challenges.
In Türkiye two focus group meetings were conducted on best practices and obstacles in ethics education. The first one took place in Ankara in May 2023 and the second one in Istanbul in June 2023. The reason behind organizing the meetings in Ankara and Istanbul was to enable the research team to collaborate with different academic circles around these major education hubs. As courses dedicated to science and technology ethics are relatively rare in Türkiye, academics specializing in ethics education across various disciplines were invited to the focus group meetings. Besides, in order to learn about the experiences on challenges and obstacles in ethics education, non-expert academics (especially from engineering faculties) offering ethics components as part of their courses were also invited.
Both in the Ankara and Istanbul studies, the focus was on the higher education sector but in each session 1 representative from the non-academic sector was invited. Thus, the research team worked with groups of 11 colleagues, 10 from higher education and 1 from the non-academic sector in each session. The disciplines of higher education participants ranged from philosophy and STS studies to medical ethics, bioethics, bioinformatics and law. Each session lasted around two hours.
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Ethics Course/Module Taught | Gender | Country | Institute |
| PA1 | Assoc. Prof. | Philosophy | Ethics, Applied Ethics | F | Türkiye | METU |
| PA2 | Assist. Prof. | Philosophy | Ethics | M | Türkiye | Ankara University |
| PA3 | Assoc. Prof. | Medicine | Medical Ethics and History of Medicine | M | Türkiye | Ankara University |
| PA4 | PhD | Sociology | Science and Technology Studies | F | Türkiye | Bilkent University |
| PA5 | PhD | Computer Education and Instructional Technology | Biomedical Ethics | F | Türkiye | METU |
| PA6 | Professor | Philosophy | Environmental Ethics | M | Türkiye | METU |
| PA7 | Professor | Chemical Engineering | Engineering Ethics | F | Türkiye | METU |
| PA8 | Professor | Statistics | Data Science Ethics | F | Türkiye | METU |
| PA9 | Assoc. Prof. | Civil Engineering | Research Methods and Ethics | F | Türkiye | METU |
| PA10 | Professor | Biotechnology | Biomedical Ethics | F | Türkiye | Ankara University |
| PA11 | PhD | Business Administration | Business Ethics | M | Türkiye | Sabancı University |
| PA12 | Assoc. Prof. | Medical Ethics and History of Medicine | Medical Ethics | F | Türkiye | Kocaeli University |
| PA13 | Professor | Science, Technology, Society | Ethics in Science and Technology | F | Türkiye | İstanbul Technical University |
| PA14 | PhD | Science and Technology Policy Studies | Entrepreneurship | F | Türkiye | Sabancı University |
| PA15 | PhD | Philosophy | Ethics | F | Türkiye | Özyeğin University |
| PA17 | PhD | Law | Cybersecurity, AI and Law | F | Türkiye | Özyeğin University |
| PA18 | PhD | Law | Medical Law and Biomedical Law | F | Türkiye | Özyeğin University |
| PA19 | Professor | Philosophy | Ethics, Applied Ethics, Bioethics | M | Türkiye | Boğaziçi University |
| PA20 | PhD | Philosophy | Bioethics | M | Türkiye | Sabancı University |
| PA21 | Assoc. Prof. | Mechanical Engineering | Engineering Ethics | M | Türkiye | Özyeğin University |
Table 1- Academic participants
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Gender | Country | Institute |
| PA1 | MS | Industrial Engineering | M | Türkiye | BSH Türkiye, Innovation Management |
| PA2 | BA | Philosophy | F | Türkiye | Technology Development Foundation of Türkiye |
Table 2- Industry Participants
Studies in Germany:
Three academics and five industry sector experts were interviewed in Germany. In August and September 2023, the process started by sending focus group invitations to over 100 academics based in Germany. They were affiliated with different institutions all over the country and had different levels of academic situations (PhDs, PostDocs, senior researchers, and professors). The first set of interviews was conducted in October 2023, with only academic participants. The second set was conducted in December 2023 with all industry expert participants. Since the initial plan encompassed participants from all over Germany, it was anticipated that bringing people to one place would be difficult. Therefore, we decided on Zoom meetings.
Despite the small number of final participants, we received several more emails and communications from our target group, showing interest in the project topic and the talk, but could not join. Thus, conducting interviews was taken as a more viable option than conducting focus groups. We conducted semi-structured expert interviews. Each interview took at least 40 minutes, which offered abundant deep and detailed data to code and analyze. The questions were based on the provided question guide for the focus group. However, the interview flow always required forking the questions to some other questions.
A solution to compensate for the lack of discussion and ideas inherent to the focus group was to bring the codes and statements from other interview partners, share them with the current interviewee, and collect the reactions and thoughts. This choice ended up with interesting reactions, as the interviewee did not feel like s/he was the only one talking or sharing ideas. Instead, after the initial introduction, the discussion was mostly treated as a place to share rather than collect. Later, the data analysis started with open coding of the transcribed interviews and mapping the codes.
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Ethics Course/Module Taught | Gender | Country | Institute |
| PA1 | PostDoc | Data Ethics | Responsible Data Science | Male | Germany | Haso Plattner Institute |
| PA2 | PhD | Science and Technology Studies | Berlin Ethics Certificate {Project Course) | Female | Germany | FU Berlin |
| PA3 | PostDoc- Guest Prof. | Business and Law Ethics, Data Science Ethics | Business Ethics, Ethics of Science Communication | Female | Germany- India | TU München |
Table 1- Academic Participants
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Gender | Country | Company | Ethics training at the University | Ethics training at work |
| IP1 | M.Sc (CE) | Data Analyst | Female | Germany | Zeiss | Limited/irrelevant to the job | Limited |
| IP2 | M.Sc (CS) | Network Administrator | Female | Germany | Public Sector | None | None |
| IP3 | M. Sc (CE) | Software Engineer | Female | Sweden | Klarna | Limited/irrelevant to the job | Limited |
| IP4 | M.Sc (CE) | Automotive Software Engineer | Male | Germany | BMW (Vector) | None | None |
| IP5 | MBA (Fashion) and M.Sc (IT) | Tech Lead | Female | Germany | Munich-Re | Limited/irrelevant to the job | None |
Table 2- Industry Participants
CHALLENGES IN ETHICS EDUCATION
- Main structural challenge: the status of ethics and/or/as understanding ethics as a relatively autonomous field/area.
- Top-down approaches in designing ethics curricula (Türkiye, Germany, xxxx)
The growing popularity of ethics education in European higher education is partly due to the new and demanding challenges arising from the extensive application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and biomedical technologies. However, even before human-technology relations became this complex and perhaps challenging, higher education institutions (HEIs) encountered external motivational influences regarding the inclusion of ethics education in their curricula. One influence here is the increasing popularity of accreditation processes all over the world in late 1990s. Some examples here include the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA, 2004), the ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) and national systems such as the Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC, 2015), Evaluation and Accreditation of Engineering Programs, Türkiye (MÜDEK, 2002), Hellenic Quality Assurance and Accreditation Agency (HQA, 2006), Hellenic Authority for Higher Education and the German Accreditation Council (2005).
Some higher education programs had to incorporate ethics elements into their curricula to meet the standards set by national or international accreditation systems in order to obtain accreditation. An illustrative example is the engineering faculty of Middle East Technical University (METU) in Türkiye which was pushed to incorporate ethics components into its curriculum during the accreditation process conducted by ABET in the 1990s. In the late 2010s the Turkish Council of Higher Education (TCHE) directed higher education institutions to include ethics components in all graduate curricula.
The main challenge posed by top-down approaches is that because the drive comes from outside rather than from within academic institutions, endeavors to meet requirements often fail to customize ethics education for different academic settings. What is more, in the Turkish context, higher education institutions did not have the autonomy to set their own schedules and train human resources before this top-down requirement was implemented. In the case of METU, for instance, in order to meet TCHE’s directives graduate programs simply extended the scope of the existing “Research Methods” courses to comply with TCHE’s directives by adding modules on ethics, typically taught by non-experts. In certain instances, the course name was changed to “Research Methods and Ethics” as evidence of compliance.
A bottom-up trend was observed in acquired data from Germany regarding the course content and instruction. Educators are offering more participatory courses to students in technology ethics modules, in which they should bring their study case, choose the appropriate ethical and analytical framework for it, and present the final product or analysis. In this process, there are opportunities for external interventions, such as a session with an industry expert. Therefore, not only the educator or the chairholder has more power in designing a course – rather than the institution – but students are also actively shaping the course’s flow. However, the bottom-up trend itself has some infrastructural challenges.
This training format is new to study programs in Germany and was mainly developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the specificity of the pandemic allowed online or remote participation, external adversarial living situations and financial pressure on students are post-pandemic reasons to maintain the current approach. An interviewee claimed the harsh rental crisis for Master’s students forced them to work hard to afford a decent life. This situation resulted in fewer students’ on-site participation, constant preference for online participation, and visiting their classmates for the project on weekends. A widespread concern in the bottom-up format is how to keep the students interested and engaged during the course, while many do not receive the same interactions as they participate online.
- Lack of institutional infrastructure, human resources and teaching material
- Lack of researchers and/or/as academic personnel
This issue can arise regardless of the academic discipline in which ethics courses or components are provided. To start with an example from Türkiye, when Turkish HEIs were required to add the ethics component to graduate curricula by the Council of Higher Education in 2010s or due to requirements of accreditation processes (e.g. in engineering programs), most faculties faced the difficulty that none of their academic staff were ready and equipped enough to offer ethics education, being non-ethicists. In other words, when the necessity to customize ethics education for different academic fields emerged, there were no trained human resources (instructors and researchers specializing in ethics) available for this task. It was not only that there were not sufficient human resources but also HEIs had no resources for offering institutional support to instructors. Whereas academic programs such as Philosophy, Biology, Education and Medicine which historically included ethics components in their curricula or research practices, adjusted to this shift relatively smoothly, other disciplines such as applied and natural sciences, computing and engineering had to address this gap by ad hoc solutions.
Among these were practices such as inviting guest speakers to give seminars on different topics such as engineering ethics, theoretical ethics, technology ethics, research ethics, etc., analyzing professional codes of conduct and case studies. Nevertheless, even when instructors covered topics like research ethics or professional ethics or identified relevant cases for classroom discussion, they often lacked the theoretical background to fully support their teaching. This experience felt akin to practicing ethics based on mere intuition. One of the focus group participants in Türkiye stated that “I am not … doing research about ethics, but talking about ethical issues in research. But, of course, as the philosophical aspects are very hard for me, the ‘universal’, ‘relative’ concepts [in ethics] are the topics that I find most difficult in the first classes.” Moreover, instructors in disciplines lacking established professional codes felt constrained by the scarcity of teaching materials available to them. One participant expressed that he could not find a CODEX that reached consensus on engineering ethics in Türkiye and had to refer to the American CODEX.
On the other hand, within the social sciences and humanities, when existing ethics instructors cover specific topics or cases in technical fields such as techno-ethics, biomedical ethics or AI ethics – issues that are pressing societal challenges to be addressed in academia – the same problem arises. No matter how well-trained they are in ethics, these instructors often lack the essential background on specific topics to thoroughly address ethical issues. Even when they invest significant time in learning the fundamentals of a such a technical field, the rapid pace of technological advancement quickly renders their efforts obsolete. One of the focus group participants in İstanbul said that he stopped covering some of the topics in his Bioethics course as he failed to keep pace with the latest advancements in the field.
Another aspect of this challenge emerges from the traditional academic infrastructures like in Germany, which seek journal publications and third-party funding for projects and positions. For instance, if an ethics educator successfully submits proposals and brings money, they can temporarily secure their position and plans. It is also the same story for journal publications. The current infrastructure is investing in publications. A survival attitude from an ethics educator in Science and Technology, Medicine, and Environmental Sciences is to publish as frequently as their STEM partners. Although publishing in Humanities and social sciences has a different magnitude of complexity than STEM.
As the H-Index and the number of publications are also crucial to many institutions worldwide, an interview partner from Germany mentioned the role of journals (old and reputable or young and name-seeking) in changing the course of ethics education. In this view, the more these journals are willing to publish interdisciplinary publications, the more the faculty would be willing to financially support ethics education and interdisciplinary research by allocating infrastructure to them. For instance, famous science and technology journals like Science and Nature now accept “a few” social science papers or commentary addressing (ethical) issues in science and technology. Moreover, as two major Computer Science associations, ACM and IEEE are initiating conferences and publication opportunities – like ACM FACcT – including ethical, legal, and social frameworks. As these are well-known associations offering peer-reviewed publications, other faculty members would take their published research seriously.
- Lack or absence of co-operation among ethics institutions
- Societal issues/factors [that have been mentioned to contribute to the main structural challenge]:
(a) Narrower social background: family and friends
(b) Wider social background: the role of ethics, in particular, and philosophy, in general, in society
- School level education
[Reference to specific lacks in school level education]
- Infrastructure issues (university level)
(a) materiality issues
(b) electronic infrastructure
(c) library and online resources
(d) lack of primary and secondary bibliography in Greek
- Traditional educational structures in technical universities
When the demand for ethics education grew in Germany, the German educators were not concerned about the teaching materials or human resources. The size of the offered courses was a good fit for the number of participants. Moreover, the affiliated supervisors gave enough supervision to the students for the project-based course. Their course started with teaching theoretical ethics, from utilitarianism and consequentialism to ethics and law, and Situated Knowledges, constructivist, feminist perspectives, and value-sensitive design. The structures of the courses were mostly participatory, allowing students to discover the theoretical framework that would better fit their needs for their project or the final essay. However, the hurdles are embedded in the traditional education structures.
The traditional force directs the program structure to offer more technical courses in technical universities or faculties. Not only does this push ethics courses into the corner, but it also requires a lot of effort from the ethics course educator to approach other faculty members for a more inclusive and interdisciplinary course. A successful story was when the ethicist proactively participated in a “technical” course as an educator and tried to connect ethics just in time with the technically taught concepts.
- Traditional ethics education (Türkiye)
In focus group studies conducted in Türkiye, traditional teaching methods such as lecturing was frequently described as outdated. Participants expressed a need for more engaging approaches in teaching and learning that encourage active learning (internalizing ethics) and critical thinking among students. They suggested including activities like case studies, role-play exercises, movie analysis, field visits and hands-on projects to enhance learning experiences and to better address the complexities of ethical issues. A participant from the faculty of medicine reported many examples of best practices as this academic discipline has traditionally incorporated ethics in curricula. Most prominent among them was perhaps the shock therapy approach where the instructor creates a real-life scenario to allow students face real life ethical dilemmas.
- Interdisciplinarity gap (Germany, Greece)
Analyzing the acquired data from Germany, the interdisciplinarity gap occurs mainly during the course among the students and teachers. This gap has three settings. The first is when a group of students of different backgrounds and majors participate in the same ethics course. The first gap appears as each has various levels of ethics education—academically and as an extracurricular topic, or none at all. The educator has to make a further effort to make sure that the participants are neither hearing a set of unmeaningful jargon nor are bored with content they have heard or studied before. Many students’ knowledge about ethics and ethical concerns is described as a “white page.” Furthermore, approaching a Techno/medico/environmental-ethical case while one discipline has already developed a strong theory, method, and argument and one is less clear or eloquent about it is noticeable in available materials and texts. Another form of contextual gap emerges since the technological deterministic mindset seems to be prevalent among many STEM students. Refuting such a determinism while ensuring that the students would not take ethics as something that drives research results out is the art of the educator.
The second setting includes non-academic views and concerns regarding the course topic. The interviewed educators in Germany engaged experts from the industry in their courses or were invited by the industry to give a course. Closing the gap between how the industry includes and perceives ethics and how it is being addressed in academia is also an interdisciplinary gap. The challenge here is usually addressed as ethics being perceived as a set of checkboxes rather than applied disciplines.
Finally, while the interview partners’ approach to teaching ethics is participatory and interdisciplinary, it is not like it would always be accepted by the department. One of the interviewees in Germany explained that at the institutional level, they encounter a dichotomy in the reception of their courses. Some faculty members, particularly from engineering and computer science, embrace the integration of ethics and sustainability into curricula, recognizing the value of adapting to contemporary educational demands. Conversely, a faction of traditionalists resists this evolution, advocating for a focus on conventional technical instruction. This schism reflects the broader debate on the role of ethics in technical education and the need for a balanced approach that accommodates the evolving landscape and foundational knowledge.
- Check-box approach vs. internalization of ethics (Türkiye, Germany)
Students in engineering and applied science programs may have prejudices about ethics being a “non-technical” but merely a “social” topic. One participant in studies in Türkiye, who has been teaching ethics components in the context of the “Science, Technology and Society” course to the whole engineering faculty, reported that a factor creating this prejudice may be that the course is offered not by a technical expert but by a social scientist. According to her, students take the course not because they think ethics is important but out of the need for ticking a check-box in their curricula.
The check-box approach is also a problematic issue observed by German educators. In their discussion, they all mentioned that an issue they try to make clear with the student is that ethics is not a bunch of checkboxes, and their approach is applied ethics rather than keeping it only to theory. In addition to the Turkish observation, they rooted this attitude in the standardized and rule-based approaches in STEM. They tried to modify it by emphasizing that ethics does not go with a one-size-fits-all concept, and each case requires and deserves its own specific considerations.
- Lack of local case studies (Türkiye)
Among the prominent discussion in focus group in Türkiye were 1) the difficulty experienced by students in internalizing ethical dilemmas and 2) grasping the practical implications of ethical principles. Case studies were highlighted as a powerful tool for addressing these difficulties. Yet, even such a strong instrument encountered difficulties when it was not carefully tailored to specific teaching and learning contexts. Pre-formulated ethical dilemmas in textbooks or cases from global context (albeit their significance) may not align with the interests of the students. As a means for tackling with this challenge, participants underlined the importance of local and possibly real-life case studies noting that these could resonate more with students. According to the majority of participants, teaching practices that facilitate discussion of local cases, focus on students’ actual experiences and explore ethical dilemmas relevant to their lives motivate students to directly engage with and internalize the cases as they grapple with formulating relevant ethical dilemmas themselves. However, cases from local contexts are hardly available in the current literature in Turkish.
Studies in Germany:
Three academics and five industry sector experts were interviewed in Germany. In August and September 2023, the process started by sending focus group invitations to over 100 academics based in Germany. They were affiliated with different institutions all over the country and had different levels of academic situations (PhDs, PostDocs, senior researchers, and professors). The first set of interviews was conducted in October 2023, with only academic participants. The second set was conducted in December 2023 with all industry expert participants. Since the initial plan encompassed participants from all over Germany, it was anticipated that bringing people to one place would be difficult. Therefore, we decided on Zoom meetings.
Despite the small number of final participants, we received several more emails and communications from our target group, showing interest in the project topic and the talk, but could not join. Thus, conducting interviews was taken as a more viable option than conducting focus groups. We conducted semi-structured expert interviews. Each interview took at least 40 minutes, which offered abundant deep and detailed data to code and analyze. The questions were based on the provided question guide for the focus group. However, the interview flow always required forking the questions to some other questions.
A solution to compensate for the lack of discussion and ideas inherent to the focus group was to bring the codes and statements from other interview partners, share them with the current interviewee, and collect the reactions and thoughts. This choice ended up with interesting reactions, as the interviewee did not feel like s/he was the only one talking or sharing ideas. Instead, after the initial introduction, the discussion was mostly treated as a place to share rather than collect. Later, the data analysis started with open coding of the transcribed interviews and mapping the codes.
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Ethics Course/Module Taught | Gender | Country | Institute |
| PA1 | PostDoc | Data Ethics | Responsible Data Science | Male | Germany | Haso Plattner Institute |
| PA2 | PhD | Science and Technology Studies | Berlin Ethics Certificate {Project Course) | Female | Germany | FU Berlin |
| PA3 | PostDoc- Guest Prof. | Business and Law Ethics, Data Science Ethics | Business Ethics, Ethics of Science Communication | Female | Germany- India | TU München |
Table 1- Academic Participants
| Participant | Academic Level | Major | Gender | Country | Company | Ethics training at the University | Ethics training at work |
| IP1 | M.Sc (CE) | Data Analyst | Female | Germany | Zeiss | Limited/irrelevant to the job | Limited |
| IP2 | M.Sc (CS) | Network Administrator | Female | Germany | Public Sector | None | None |
| IP3 | M. Sc (CE) | Software Engineer | Female | Sweden | Klarna | Limited/irrelevant to the job | Limited |
| IP4 | M.Sc (CE) | Automotive Software Engineer | Male | Germany | BMW (Vector) | None | None |
| IP5 | MBA (Fashion) and M.Sc (IT) | Tech Lead | Female | Germany | Munich-Re | Limited/irrelevant to the job | None |
Table 2- Industry Participants
BEST PRACTICES IN ETHICS EDUCATION
The cases in this list have been chosen to present best practices implemented in different academic and professional contexts. The academic context is most of the time a full semester or modular course or a certificate program which aim to facilitate theoretical and/or practical ethics education. On the other hand, the professional contexts consist of in-service training programmes, projects that include ethics (training) components or voluntarily attended programs.