Scaffolding Undergraduate Students' Ethical Cyber Behaviour With Philosophy and Theory

Abstract

Due to the growing challenges of cyber security, accreditation agencies demand computing ethics and professionalism as part of the computer science undergraduate curriculum. Many professional bodies developed codes of ethics and professional conduct, providing fundamental principles and letting the professional “decide” their response to face ethical dilemmas. The ethical codes rarely provide examples from real life. Therefore, in a six-month semester, the authors developed a teaching and learning module simulating real-life conflicting scenarios to enable students to participate in ethical and philosophical argumentation. They also target to demonstrate how storytelling, conflicting scenarios, and comics can be used to enhance computer science students' engagement in theoretical and philosophical discussions related to ethical cyber behaviour. Two assignments were part of the students' evaluation. They need to develop textual and visual conflicting scenarios for co-distributed clauses of the ACM code of ethics and then test those scenarios with users.