Ethics Learning Outcome: An Integrated Learning Experience

Professional Ethics is one of the professional skills included in the CDIO syllabus that needs to be acquired by engineering students since their first year at the university. Using the CDIO approach, we designed a model to develop competencies in Ethics and Social Role of the profession in students, and applied it to a course taken by all freshmen.

This model includes the following stages:

1. Set up a multidisciplinary team with experts in Ethics, course professors and teaching development consultants

2. Design and validate the Learning Outcome in Ethics and Social Role of the profession.

3. Set up the levels of achievement that will measure the progression of students in developing these competencies

4. Analyze the course sequences and identify a minimum path to develop the competencies

5. Set up a multidisciplinary team to develop the levels of achievement, including in it the professors of the courses involved.

6. Implementation and monitoring

7. Evaluation

This model was applied at the School of Engineering and Sciences of the University of Chile for its undergraduate programs.

In this paper we describe the development of the first level of achievement in the “Introduction to Engineering” course.

The experience obtained in building the model and implementing it in the “Introduction to Engineering” course has shown the importance of the integrated learning experiences (CDIO standard 7), as well as team work and crossing traditional discipline boundaries. These are necessary conditions for the proposed model to reach its goal.