Ethics and Citizenship Education across the Biomedical Engineering Curriculum

Abstract

Biomedical engineering is a highly regulated profession, where ethical issues are a constant. Through the last decade great effort has been done to promote ethics education along with engineering education. However, new challenges have arisen globally regarding sustainable development and societal needs, so students require also being prepared with a humanistic outlook. To achieve this goal, humanities and social sciences can be taught within the engineering education.

In this paper, we describe the strategy that has been followed by Tecnologico de Monterrey to foster ethics and citizenship education in the total of its undergraduate programs, introducing these subjects both as standalone courses and also as part of the engineering courses. To strength this initiative, a thorough campaign was launched to certify professors in ethics and citizenship, thus new academic activities have been designed deeply intertwined with disciplinary concepts. The acquisition of both outcomes has been assessed through direct and indirect measurements, where Key Performance Indicators have been defined. The use of the strategy in the Biomedical Engineering program is explained on detail.