Promote Professionalism with Free Online Ethics Course

Straight after the ACS Canberra Conference, I attended a focus group run by Oliver Burmeister from Charles Sturt University, on promoting professionalism in ICT. This is part of a two year study funded by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) on "Investigating which strategies are most effective in overcoming ethical problems facing information and communications technology professionals". My suggestion was to provide free open access educational materials online which meet the requirements for ACS accredited education programs.

ACS could assemble material into the form of free online self paced courses. Thse could be used by anyone wanting to improve their understanding of professional ethics, used by ACS in its own educational programs, by an educational institutions in their programs and as an example of the minimum standard ACS requires for all accredited programs. For the last ten years I have been teaching ICT Ethics using materials from ACS to students at the  Australian National University:  "Professional Ethics and Social Issues in Networked Information Systems".

Previous published work by Oliver on ICT ethics includes:"Ethics of Computing Committees: Suggestions for Functions, Form, and Structure (2008).