Members of 4TU.Ethics do a lot of ethics teaching for engineering students, in a wide range of engineering disciplines. Since ethics are mostly taught in context, case-based exercises (CBEs) are a central instrument in this teaching practice. Teachers create these exercises for use in their own teaching, but these CBEs are hardly ever shared or published while they could be reused (or used as an inspiration) by other teachers in the community.
To create a channel for reuse and a process for production and publication of CBEs, 4TU.Ethics started the project Ethics Education for Engineers, supported by a grant from Open and online education incentive scheme of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. In accordance with the Centre’s mission to innovate education in the ethics of technology, it was decided to publish CBEs as Open Educational Resources (i.e. publicly accessible and released under an open license allowing free access, use, adaptation, and redistribution).
Over the past 2.5 years, standards for the documentation of CBEs were defined and contributions from 40 members of 4TU.Ethics have been developed into a collection of 60 CBEs and published on the 4TU.Ethics community pages on the edusources platform (SURF)