Ethical dilemmas (no)

Pedagogical value

The rise of artificial intelligence presents particularly significant challenges for teaching and assessing students at Norwegian institutions of higher education. In addition, we are seeing that today’s generation of students—who have grown up with screens—are less able than previous generations to read longer texts, and to focus their attention on academic work and teaching. They often seek digital alternatives to articles and books. The starting point for this project is the need to find new ways of teaching and new methods for assessing students’ skills. During the pandemic, we observed that students appreciated digital learning tools in their education. After the pandemic, it has been challenging to return to physical teaching with traditional tools and methods. In this project, we will create a series of videos about several contemporary ethical dilemmas. These are intended to supplement the curriculum and be part of the teaching of a course in ethics at both the graduate and undergraduate level. The idea is that students watch the videos before class, and then we design a setup with questions for discussion in the lectures or seminars that follow. The hypothesis is that students will be more motivated for teaching when, in addition to the curriculum, they can watch videos that effectively and thoroughly introduce them to the ethical issues addressed in the course. Eventually, we will also produce podcast versions of all the videos, so that students have the option to listen without watching. The aim is to publish the video series, with accompanying podcasts, on www.vitentv.no as well as on the university’s YouTube and Vimeo channels. Here we will produce different learning activities connected with the videoes, such as study questions and links to other study material that can engage the students.