As in other professions, the accreditation standards for engineering programs require that students develop an understanding of their professional and ethical responsibilities. Instruction in engineering ethics typically emphasizes historical cases of technological disasters, but these cases do not capture the ethical issues in everyday engineering practice. To investigate how engineers understand and experience ethics in actual practice, we interviewed a purposefully selected, diverse group of 43 engineers at several employers in the health products industry. We used the methodology of phenomenography to design the study and to analyze the data, and we applied the Q3 framework of Walther and Sochacka to promote quality and trustworthiness throughout the research process. Our phenomenographic analysis produced an outcome space with six categories, which range from following regulations to stewarding a culture of integrity. Our results significantly broaden previous understandings of ethical engineering practice. Using our results, instructors can systematically create learning activities that demonstrate the variation in ways that students can experience ethics in engineering practice. (Joint work with Andrew Brightman, Nicholas Fila, Justin Hess, Alison Kerr, Dayoung Kim, and Carla Zoltowski)

Michael Loui

Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and University Distinguished Teacher-Scholar, University of Illinois

Michael C. Loui is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and University Distinguished Teacher-Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He held the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in Engineering Education at Purdue University from 2014 to 2019. He has conducted research in computational complexity theory, in professional ethics, and in engineering education. He is a Carnegie Scholar, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education. Professor Loui was Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education from 2012 to 2017 and Executive Editor of College Teaching from 2006 to 2012. He was Associate Dean of the Graduate College at Illinois from 1996 to 2000. He directed the Theory of Computing Program at the National Science Foundation from 1990 to 1991. He earned the Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 and the B.S. at Yale University in 1975.