Instructors may submit Exam Papers, Homework solutions,
or any other student assignment to either
the TurnItIn.com
or the SafeAssign
plagiarism-detection services, in compliance with all of the following:
GMU policy, Provost approval, and the
GMU Honor Code.
Courses designed to meet the IT Ethics Gen Ed requirement must address
both of these 2 outcomes:
Students will understand many of the key ethical, legal and social issues related to information technology and how to interpret and comply with ethical principles, laws, regulations, and institutional policies.
Students will understand the essential issues related to information security, how to take precautions and use techniques and tools to defend against computer crimes.
Examination of ethical issues related to access and use of information
and data in the Internet age, for the general student, with special
emphasis on ethical issues that apply to the proper use and
interpretation of scientific and technical information.
This course is designed to present and to engage students in activities
and discussion related to the serious ethical issues arising from the
widespread distribution of data and information in the Internet age.
Students will gain a deeper understanding of ethics as it applies to
the use and interpretation of data in the sciences. In addition to
statistical and scientific case studies, students will be presented
with practical ethical challenges that they may face in their future
corporate, government, or academic employment.
As an added benefit, students will acquire RCR
(Responsible Conduct in Research) Certification or else HSR
Board Certification through completion of the free on-line
GMU Human Subjects Research (HSR) training course.
Grading:
25% = Homework
25% = Class Participation (in-class exercises)
25% = CHOOSE ONE -- COMPLETE ONE OF THESE CERTIFICATIONS:
to develop an understanding of the following:
access and use of private versus public data sources;
data ownership and proprietary rights;
differences between secure, private, confidential, and open data;
proper use versus the abuse and misuse of statistics, maps, and graphs;
fallacious reasoning; deduction versus inference from data;
bias versus objectivity in the interpretation of data;
data falsification and cases of scientific fraud;
the proper referencing of sources versus plagiarism;
the ethical (and legal) handling and use of human subjects research data.
Weekly Schedule: (subject to change)
Week 1: Summary of Course, Introduction to Data Ethics
Week 2: Statistics: Use, Abuse, and Misuse
Week 3: Statistics: Mean, Medians, and Modes -- Telling Lies with Statistics
Week 4: Statistical Concepts -- Ethical Concerns
Week 5: Drawing Conclusions -- Inference and Deduction -- Relationship to IT Ethics
Week 6: The Rules of IT Ethics
Week 7: IT Ethics in Practice -- What we should do vs. What the hackers do
Week 8: Special Topic: The Dark Side of Binary
Week 9: Whose Information is it anyway? -- Part 1: Proliferation of On-line Information
Week 10: Whose Information is it anyway? -- Part 2: Data Privacy and Privacy Laws
Week 11: Responsible Conduct in Research (RCR): Scientific Ethics and Integrity in Research
Week 12: Human Subjects Research (HSR): Principles and Applications
Week 13: InfoGraphics -- Visual Displays for Reasoning
Week 14: Visual and Statistical Thinking, and Final Exam Review
