Content search “Ethics software” on MOOCs, esp. edX & Coursera

  

This work takes on two research questions:

· Research question 1 (RQ1): What are common structures of curricula that integrate software-related topics and ethics? 

· Research question 2 (RQ2): What are common topics in the curricula?

I analyzed six well-known platforms for MOOCs (edX, Coursera, FutureLearn, Khan Academy, Udacity, and Udemy). All of those platforms offer a search function. The first search term was “ethics software”. I used a deliberately wide search term in order to find a wide array of courses.

It is unclear how the search functions work (e.g., usage of which properties of a course; if the two words are connected by an AND- or an OR-conjunction) and they work probably differently across the platforms: 

· Udemy lists 3,998 courses on this search term. The search term was therefore restricted to “ethics” and filtered by pre-defined keywords “IT security” and “Artificial Intelligence”.

· Coursera lists 49 results.

· Khan Academy lists 19 items, but not one of them is course. 

· EdX delivers 10 items.

· Future Learn delivers eight results.

· Udacity delivers one result.

Although I collected data from six MOOC platforms, this sampling covers only two platforms, namely edX and Coursera.