Ethics in engineering education 4.0: The educator's perspective

Abstract

The advent of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has had an all-pervasive influence on virtually every aspect of high-quality manufacturing and associated services. Consequently, it triggered increasing industry demand to drive technological transformation. By implication, this propelled transformation in the requirements of Higher Education (HE) during the process of training engineers, towards more blended or online modes of delivery. A common concern from commentators has been “What are the ethical implications of using technology when teaching engineering students”. The objective of this paper is to expand on a previously published literature study which theoretically examined the extent to which ethics has been considered during the process of training engineers in contemporary times. In this follow-up study, a survey research instrument (n=68) which included eight likert scale questions and ten open-ended questions, was used to empirically explore three ethical dilemmas which emerged during the precursor study. The ethical dilemmas are (1) the unintended negative consequences of using technology; (2) discrimination as a result of the use of technology and (3) educator agency in the Engineering Education 4.0, at a University of Technology (UoT) in South Africa. Ethical clearance to do this research was secured through institutional channels. The findings of this study were consistent with findings of the precursor study and the recommendation of this study is that a series of workshops be held to develop ethics guidelines and establish ethical best practices to assist engineering educators to assure the quality of online engineering education, avoid discrimination, protect the privacy of both students and educators and reinforce the integrity of online engineering assessments.