Information System Ethics: Refining the Pedagogy

This article describes an approach to teaching ethics in the information system curriculum that the authors have used successfully in a variety of courses at various levels. The approach is comprised of five steps: 1. Administering to students a questionnaire designed to address ethical and policy issues; 2. Reporting to the students a summary of their responses to the questionnaire and those of previous classes; 3. Using the responses as an entree to pose other ethically ambiguous situations and solicit from student volunteers their solutions to the situations; 4. Furnishing the students with normative solutions to these situation as provided by experts; and 5. Using additional scenarios to develop generic ethical principles that can be applied to other situations as well.. The article proceeds to explain the psychological principles that make this approach effective. Experimental validation of this approach have been reported in a companion article