Practising responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a hands-on course
This work addresses the need for ethical training in NLP education, offering a practical approach for educators, though it is incremental in nature.
The authors tackled the challenge of integrating ethics into NLP education by developing a hands-on course using active learning methods, which has been refined over four years and produced reusable teaching materials and student-created educational products.
As Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems become more pervasive, integrating ethical considerations into NLP education has become essential. However, this presents inherent challenges in curriculum development: the field's rapid evolution from both academia and industry, and the need to foster critical thinking beyond traditional technical training. We introduce our course on Ethical Aspects in NLP and our pedagogical approach, grounded in active learning through interactive sessions, hands-on activities, and "learning by teaching" methods. Over four years, the course has been refined and adapted across different institutions, educational levels, and interdisciplinary backgrounds; it has also yielded many reusable products, both in the form of teaching materials and in the form of actual educational products aimed at diverse audiences, made by the students themselves. By sharing our approach and experience, we hope to provide inspiration for educators seeking to incorporate social impact considerations into their curricula.