A Web-based Interactive Approach for Engineering Ethics Training in a Global Learning Environment

Globalization has affected the very fabric of business and engineering activities.Increasingly, new products are now designed, developed and manufactured through a collaboration of engineering, business, and manufacturing personnel from different parts of the world, many of whom significantly differ from each other in their cultural backgrounds and "Proceedings of the 2006 Midwest Section Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education"2 perspectives.This diversity entails differences in recognition and awareness of ethical issues, which must be addressed within the additional context of the increasing complexity of new technology development.A main challenge is how to address the educational requirements for engineering students and current engineering professionals to assess awareness and facilitate development of ethical reasoning skills within a cross-cultural context.This paper proposes an adaptation of an existing metaphorical approach to intercultural communication (ICC) called "cage painting" to explore the complexities and uncertainties of ethical decision-making.The current methodology of ethics training in a university environment includes case-based learning, which provides specific instances of ethical decision-making scenarios with clearly established options, but may not include the complexity and uncertainty factor of new technology, which may cloud the decision-making process.Or the scenarios may be so open-ended that no discernable course of action can be determined.The cage painting approach utilizes mutual perspective exchange and reflection to resolve a preconception or misconception -based scenario.Multiple scenarios have been previously developed into an interactive computer-based ICC tool.This paper proposes development of similar ethics-based scenarios for ethics training.A sample scenario is included in this paper which can be part of a larger ethics scenario database.The existing cage painting assessment methodology may also be useful to assess the student's ability to resolve the ethics problem.