Democratizing Computing Ethics
partnering with students to develop computing ethics curricula across the curriculum
With the rapid rise of AI, there is a critical need for everyone to have access to knowledge about the social and ethical implications of AI. With AI impacting all aspects of our lives, this is not knowledge just for computer scientists, software engineers, and the like. This is knowledge for everyone.
In this project, we took a radically new approach to democratizing AI ethics knowledge. We partnered students with faculty to co-create curricula on AI ethics. The first partnership was between El Muchuwa and Willie Wilson, who co-created a new course in which undergraduate students would develop new ethics curricul for other courses, all of which would be outside of computer science. To prepare them for this endeavor, they learned about AI and related technologies, ethics, and pedagogical principles. To address the implications of technology across many fields, students needed to consider different perspectives. Our approach to designing the course centered around inclusivity, where the content was relevant and accessible and the environment was open and accepting (Muchuwa et al., 2025).
As part of this course, students partnered them with faculty to develop an ethics curricular module to be integrated into one of their existing courses. A key component of these partnerships was that students and faculty worked together as equals, not the students working for the faculty. This required following the three principles of curriculum co-creation: respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. Students and faculty developed materials for courses in cogntive science, creative writing, data science, economics, environmental science, public health, and sociology.
Students in the course said that the course, the material, and the discussions felt “urgent and relevant”. They said this course was “preparing students for the real world unlike any other class” (Muchuwa & Wilson, 2026).
In our goal of democratizing computing ethics knowledge, we aim to enable others to benefit from our experiences. We are providing details on the course design process (Muchuwa et al., 2025) and the outcomes of the course (Muchuwa & Wilson, 2026). We are also making available the syllabus for our course and many of the assignments and activities. Additionally, each of the seven modules developed by the student/faculty partnerships are also available. To access these materials, we ask that you complete this curricular materials request form.