Author: Louise Bezuidenhout, Robert Quick, Hugh Shanahan
Publisher: Science and Engineering Ethics
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: The following article discusses how institutions and organizations around the world are developing research data science curricula to teach the programming and computational skills that are needed to build and maintain data infrastructures and maximize the use of available data. However, few of these courses have included an explicit ethics component, and developing such components can be challenging. This paper describes a novel approach to teaching data ethics on short courses developed for the CODATARDA Schools for Research Data Science. The ethics content of these schools is centered on the concept of open and responsible (data) science citizenship that draws on virtue ethics to promote ethics of practice. Despite having little formal teaching time, this concept of citizenship is made central to the course by distributing ethics content across technical modules. Ethics instruction consists of a wide range of techniques, including stand-alone lectures, group discussions and mini-exercises linked to technical modules.