Teaching Digital Ethics in Information Systems

This paper reviews and discusses the little-explored topic of digital ethics education in Information Systems and related fields. The importance of teaching digital ethics to students studying information and communication technologies (ICT) is increasingly recognised. However, it is unclear how ethics should best be taught to these future ICT practitioners. Using a narrative literature review methodology to explore existing scholarly work, this paper identifies five pedagogical theories related to digital ethics education. Additionally, the paper outlines approaches that deploy standalone ethics units, integrated ethics teaching, and hybrid teaching approaches, and identifies the employment of and emphasis given to various moral theories in digital ethics education. The paper then discusses how these three sets of findings—namely, different pedagogical approaches, degree of integration of ethics teaching, and use of moral theories—are related to each other. It provides educators with information and reflections to consider when designing digital ethics teaching