Abstract:

You can hardly find a general E-Business textbook nowadays that does not include a Chapter on Ethical, social & Legal issues. This is truly justified since the Internet has created new forms of business & social interactions and environments that people were not accustomed to before. These new online business environments have given a great rise to problems and issues related to copyrights infringements, plagiarism, fraud, vandalism, slander, and privacy, to name a few. This has raised the importance of stressing ethical, social, global, and legal issues in companies and other types of public and private organizations. This means that university programs must play an important role in equipping their students with such important principles. Hence, it is very common to find that ethics is an important “student outcome” that is suggested by accreditation bodies such as ABET, and organization that accredits engineering, computing, and technology programs at the global level.

Being part of an international ABET accredited Information Systems (IS) program meant that ethics was an important topic that needs to be covered in the program. The E-Business course, which is a 400-level course, is one of the courses that is selected by the department to deliver these values to the students, as one of the different outcomes of the course. Being in an Muslim country where the population mainly profess the Islamic faith, a decision was made by the author of this paper to adopt some of the religious teachings to deliver the required ethical principles rather than rely of the course textbook which mainly reflects the American ethical and legal environment and discusses American-based laws and acts. The main concerns before adopting this approach were that students would not accept receiving religious insights in an IS course, and that they would especially not like that these insights are being discussed by a faculty who is not specialized in religious studies.

This paper will present the technique and frequency during the week that such religious values were presented to the students. It will also give the motivations behind using this approach, with examples showing how presented religious principles were tied in-class with the most common ethical values. It will additionally present results of an empirical study that students at the end of the course were actually very pleased with the utilized approach. Students were also positively influenced with regard to some of the non-ethical or illegal practices they might have taken for granted through the virtual medium, such as the violation of copyrighted material and other ethical, social, and legal related issues.

Keywords:

Ethics, education, e-business, religion, Islam.