Dublin Descriptors

Expected learning outcomes

Knowledge and understanding

Students will:

• Acquire a broad perspective on the ethical and social impacts and implications of science and technology;
• Be acquainted with normative ethics and normative argumentation;
• Learn how to recognize and analyze ethical and social aspects and issues inherent in some technological applications;
• Be able to understand how technical problems are inherently connected to a social dimension within a socio-technical perspective.

Applying knowledge and understanding

Students will:

• Be able to use critical skills in clarifying and ethically analyzing case-studies involving technology;
• Be able to apply ethical theories to problems created, aggravated or transformed by current technologies;
• Be able to explore and assess possibilities for solving or diminishing existing and emerging ethical and social problems.

Making judgements

Students will be able:

• To autonomously and critically analyze the ethical issues raised by a given technology;
• To evaluate and select the appropriate knowledge in the effort of elaborating and justifying a philosophical argument on a topic autonomously selected.

Communication

Students will learn to:

• Exercise and improve their skills in a critical writing;
• Present in an effective way the results of their research, being able to justify their choices.

Lifelong learning skills

Students will:

• Be better prepared to their future professional life in an ethically and socially responsible way;
• Be able to analyze problems through an ethical lens.

Type of assessment

Description

Dublin descriptor

Collective presentations

Students are encouraged to:

• Develop an argument in which the presented claims are justified by the use of ethical argumentation and the relevant literature;
• Discuss this argument in an oral presentation in class in front of the instructor and their student colleagues.

1, 3

4, 5

Individual written essay

• The individual final essay must show that the student has the capacity to read and carefully study the suggested bibliography and the ability to apply it to case-studies or relevant topics;
• The individual final essay requires students to have developed critical skills in analyzing technical problems with the tools provided by ethical theories and argumentation.

1, 2

3, 4, 5