Survey of Approaches for Including the Impact of Technology on Society in Canadian Engineering Undergraduate Curricula

摘要

Increasingly, engineering educators are called on to include the technology-society interface in undergraduate engineering education, but little consensus exists on precisely how to present or treat technology and society in the classroom. However, it is generally recognized that the topic should be taught from a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective and integrated into the engineering curriculum. Within Canada, engineering programs are required to complement technical content with several complementary studies topics, including impact of technology on society. Canadian engineering programs have generally required a single, stand-alone course on each complementary study topic. Recent changes to the accreditation requirements seem to indicate an increased emphasis on the technology-society interface as well as the need to integrate the topic across the curriculum. We characterize current approaches for fulfilling the impact of technology on society requirement and discuss the disciplinary perspectives used by Canadian universities. Our findings indicate that many are still meeting the requirement solely with a stand-alone course. However, several have made progress toward more fully integrating impact of technology on society into the curriculum.