It is becoming increasingly clearer that colleges and universities have an obligation to address various questions that arise in the field of ethics and responsible leadership as part of their curricula. Just how these questions should be managed, however, is not always as clear. Should stand-alone courses in ethics be the norm? Or should a strategy of integrating ethics within currently existing courses be adopted? Perhaps both stand-alone and integration are desirable?

Introduction to the EDM Project
The assumption of the Ethical Decision-Making (EDM) project is that integrating ethics into existing courses is a worthy endeavor as one way for institutions of higher education and their academic divisions to address ethics in their curricula. The following is a plan detailing steps to be taken to implement the ethics integration strategy at Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT). This strategy will be called the “Ethical Decision-Making Project” or the EDM Project. This document details the scope of the EDM Project at CIT.

The Scope of EDM
The Project will have a significant faculty development component to give members of the CIT faculty who join the Project the background and support necessary to incorporate ethical decision-making and applied ethics into their own classroom teaching. Project members will meet four times over the course of the current academic year (dates TBA) when the Project director will conduct group sessions designed to provide CIT Project faculty with developmental learning experiences in the area of ethics education. It is expected that this development effort will consist of three main types of activities:

Planning Activities: CIT faculty members will begin by working to analyze his/her course seeking appropriate junctures in the course to incorporate ethical decision-making explicitly. The faculty member will identify areas in which he/she needs assistance and guidance, and obtain these with help from the Project director, and/or other colleagues who are members of the Project group.

Sharing Activities: These may be of various types that have the goal of assisting CIT faculty to gain a level of comfort in being able to address ethics in their classrooms. Among these activities are:

• Group discussions/seminars led by the Project director about the history of theoretical ethics, the nature of ethical decision-making, applied ethics and its role in areas of CIT faculty engineering expertise, how to best teach ethics case studies via the Socratic method and identifying teaching resources in applied ethics and engineering ethics education.

• Sharing activities will also include group efforts such as identifying, reading and discussing articles pertinent to the effort, designing common class activities or strategies, and the creation of formative and summative evaluations. During these group efforts, possibilities for common activities for faculty members in this Project to teach collaboratively will be identified.

Implementation Activities: CIT faculty will work with the Project Director individually on specific details of his/her course primarily via email or in one-on-one consultations. For example, individual faculty members may develop web-based multimedia material, design and write case studies, analyze an existing case study, create role-playing exercises or devise some other instructional set of tools that is appropriate to assist them to successfully integrate ethical-decision making into their teaching.

Educational Outcomes
There are three main goals of the EDM Project. The first of these is to help students become aware of the ethical dimensions of technical problems in engineering. Second, students should be urged to use ethics frameworks in engineering decision-making. The final goal is to insure that students recognize the social responsibilities they will have as professionals.

These educational outcomes have been referred to in the literature of engineering education as “teaching in context” and the EDM Project will emphasize this in its programming. To successfully achieve these goals, CIT faculty will develop educational modules through the various activities described above and introduce these in their course work beginning n the fall term of 2007 and thereafter.

Project Director
The Project director is Peter Madsen, Distinguished Service Professor of Ethics and Social Responsibility at CMU. Madsen, who is also executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy, is an award-winning educator, trainer, writer and producer of educational media in the field of applied ethics. He teaches management ethics courses at the Heinz School and courses in business, professional, environmental and computer ethics in the Department of Philosophy. He is recipient of CMU’s Robert E. Doherty Award and a recipient of the Emil Limbach Teaching Excellence Award from the Heinz School.

Madsen has experience directing three other EDM-type projects. Two of these were at Carnegie Mellon where the integration of ethics into course work was completed by professors in such departments as Civil, Environmental and Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, Architecture and Business Administration. The first of these projects was supported by a grant from a CMU alumnus and the second version by the National Science Foundation. The third such project was conducted with faculty from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores (ITESM) in Monterrey, Mexico. ITESM is a large system of higher education in Mexico with campuses throughout the country.