Digital ethics and sustainability

We explore the key sustainability challenges facing the environment, society, business and the information technology sector, and ask some difficult and justified questions about how to address these challenges. These issues are explored on the organisational and the broader institutional or societal levels introducing both mainstream and critical views of corporate responsibility, sustainability and the role of business and technology in our society.

We then extend the discussion to digital ethics issues, including hot topics in IT such as big data and analytics as well as related real-world concerns, cost of digitalisation from a sustainability point of view and explore a number of cases that raise the topic of digital ethics.

Learning outcomes

After the course, the student has the ability to

• identify short and long term future consequences of plans and decisions from an integrated scientific, ethical and intergenerational perspective and to merge this into a solution-focused approach, moving towards a sustainable society.
• realise ethical and sustainability considerations when developing new products/technologies.
• recognise and address diverse obstacles in transforming a technology into a business.
• recognise both benefits and real-world concerns that digitalisation brings to the fields of IT and sustainability.

Teaching schedule

No exam. No presence required. No particular schedule except for the weekly deadlines for exercises.