This course teaches students the essential elements of a Value-based Engineering for sustainable, accountable and responsible IT system design. Value-based Engineering is a Requirements' engineering and IT Innovation approach, which helps built systems in an  “Ethics-by-Design” manner.

Due to the combination of moral philosophy, discourse ethics, particaptory design, value sensitive design and risk-based design the course allows students to to understand the social implications of timely IT Innovations. They gain an understanding of the true human challenges arising from IT designs for direct as well as indirect stakeholders.

Value-based Engineering as taught in this course introduces students to formulate an ethically aligned value strategy for IT infrastructure. Concrete approaches for the identification of technical and organizational system design requirements are presented and applied in class in the form of running, group-based, case-study exercises.

The goal of the course as a whole is to give students a first theoretical as well as practical grasp of what it would mean to become a 'Value Lead' for IT companies or what is now also called an "Ethical AI Advisor". 

The course is accompanied by the textbook "Value-based Engineering" https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110793383/html

• system requirements engineering through stakeholder value understanding
• an insight into ethical, value-based technology innovation and system requirements analysis
• an understanding of human and social values and their ontology
• the skill to explore stakeholder values with the help of moral philosophy
• the ability to derive a proper value proposition for an IT innovation
• the know-how to translate value principles into IT system requirements or concrete design features
• some modeling tools to support value-based engineering
• enhancement of linguistic ability

This class requires full attendance.

This course is done in a flip-teaching mode. So students are coming to class in a prepared way: They need to watch the lecture upfront online and read text passages from the textbook. They pass a mini test on their presentation each week. They then work in their group to prepare a specific exercise. Each week one group needs to resume the weekly content and/or present their in-class group work. The course wraps up with an expose of a case study.

70% weekly mini quizes

10% group work in class

20% final case study expose prepared in group

Grading Scheme:

• 85-100   very good
• 75-84   good
• 65-74  satisfactory
• 50-64  not satisfactory
•  < 50  failed

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