A Framework for Class Activities to Cultivate Responsible Leadership in Software Engineering Students

Software and information technologies are becoming increasingly integrated and pervasive in human society, and range from automated decision making to running critical infrastructure like utilities and financial institutions. There is also a growing awareness of the need to develop leaders who will harness these technologies in fair and inclusive ways. Many academic and industry researchers are advocating for the responsible use of information technologies and some academic and research institutions such as IEEE and ACM have published codes of ethics to spread awareness about these issues. In this regard, a number of academic researchers, including the authors of this paper, have expressed the need to teach students computer and information ethics as well as professional and leadership skills. In this paper, we propose an approach that is potentially effective in helping students develop leadership and communication skills as well as learn broader skills of professional responsibility. The proposed approach is modeled after Toastmasters, a very successful association present in over 140 countries with almost 350,000 members across more than 16,000 clubs. We describe our goal and give a general description of a Toastmasters club and how it is conducted. Further, we describe some activities and projects having CS/SE context that can be done by students as part of a relevant class. Finally, we briefly describe the approach that we are undertaking in our first pilot activities and their integration with additional synergetic strategies.