Satya Sundar Sethy

Buddhists endorse the concept of human actions and their consequences as they uphold the doctrine of karma. However, they deny the existence of a ‘permanent self’. Few questions arise in this regard. If a permanent self does not exist then who guides a person to decide the course of an action? How does a person choose to perform an action of the many alternatives in a situation? Who takes responsibility for the consequences of an action? This paper attempts to answer these questions by reinterpreting the Buddhist’s ‘no-self’ theory from epistemological and logical perspectives. This paper argues that Buddhists while rejecting the existence of a ‘permanent self’ affirm the existence of impermanent psychophysical entities (five skandhas). The mereological sum of these psychophysical entities is known as a ‘person’ who performs actions. A person becomes morally responsible for the consequences of an action justifying the Buddhist doctrine of karma.

In the Indian higher education (HE) setting, what ‘academic freedom’ of students and faculty members constitutes has not been discussed in detail. As a result, many faculty members and students have discerned ‘academic freedom’ as freedom from external control and influence. It is noticed that faculty members and students are often misinterpreting and misconstruing the concept of ‘academic freedom’ as ‘legal freedom’ and confused it with ‘civil and political rights’. This creates a hurdle to achieve the aims and objectives of Indian HE institutions. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses the concept of ‘academic freedom’ and its importance in the higher education setting. It examines the relationship between ‘academic freedom’ and ‘university autonomy’ in the Indian context. It discusses the HE institution’s social responsibilities concerning the notion of 'academic freedom'. It delineates faculty member’s and student’s academic freedom in the Indian higher education setting. It submits that ‘academic freedom’ is not to be treated as ‘legal freedom’. But it is an essential requisite for quality teaching-learning activities, productive and rewarding research works in higher education. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology that subsumes descriptive, evaluative, and interpretative approaches to derive its conclusion.

Assessment is an integral part of a course curriculum. It is imperative because it helps students know their strengths and weaknesses of course contents and gives them the opportunity to overcome their weaknesses. Further, it guides course teachers-cum-assessors to evaluate their performance about the course. With this background, this chapter critically examines criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessment, and the advantages of providing feedback on students’ performance. It discusses how higher education teachers are expected to assess students’ performance professionally, and what role they play to ascertain students’ learning on course contents. Finally, the chapter highlights the challenges Higher Education (HE) teachers encounter while assessing students’ performance.

For most professions, a code of ethics exists to promote positive behavior among practitioners in order to enrich others within the field as well as the communities they serve. Similar to the medical, law, and business fields, the engineering discipline also instills a code of ethical conduct. Contemporary Ethical Issues in Engineering highlights a modern approach to the topic of engineering ethics and the current moral dilemmas facing practitioners in the field. Focusing on key issues, theoretical foundations, and the best methods for promoting engineering ethics from the pre-practitioner to the managerial level, this timely publication is ideally designed for use by engineering students, active professionals, and academics, as well as researchers in all disciplines of engineering.

Learning is an ever-present phenomenon. It takes place irrespective of time and place. It engages learners in their interested topic/content. Learning absorbs many skills, such as; reading skills, writing skills, technological skills, emotional skills, behavioral skills, cognitive skills, and language skills. Out of all these, cognitive skills play significant role for apprehending a concept and comprehending a discussion. In the context of distance education (DE), learning never restrains to print medium only, it has extended to the various technological media with abundant possibilities for multiple variations of online and web instructions. This article discusses how cognitive skills assist learners in their learning through technology instructions. Further, it elucidates the technological impacts in the distance learning scenario. Consequently, it argues that the intervention of suitable and advanced technology helps learners to develop their cognitive skills and assists in their learning activities.

The concept of „free will‟ states that when more than one alternative is available to an individual, he/she chooses freely and voluntarily to render an action in a given context. A question arises, how do human beings choose to perform an action in a given context? What happens to an individual to choose an action out of many alternatives? The free will theorists claim that free will guides individuals to choose an action voluntarily. Therefore, he/she is morally responsible for his/her voluntary actions. This paper attempts to answer whether a person‟s action is an outcome of his/her free will or brain processes? While answering this question, it examines the relation between free will and the principle of causality. It analyses participation of free will for human beings‟ decision-making process(es) for voluntary actions and therefore acceptance of moral responsibility for that action. This paper submits that human beings use their „free will‟ to decide the course of an action and therefore they „own‟ their actions. This paper also tries to trace the source of human voluntary actions to „free will‟ and submits that the experience of „free will‟ is an outcome of the experience of „self‟.

This book discusses the significance, relevance, and usefulness of professional ethics in the context of higher education. It highlights the pivotal role of professional ethics in offering teachers a better understanding of their responsibilities, duties, rights, and institutional obligations as they work to provide quality education. The volume investigates the connection between the adoption of professional ethics by individual faculty members in higher education and the development of work cultures in higher educational institutions. It explores the requisite modifications of the Teachers’ Code of Ethics in relation to the usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in teaching-learning platforms. While examining the validity, reliability, and application of professional ethics in the higher education sector, the book also illustrates the application of codes of ethics to resolve conflicting interests and commitments. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers in higher education, the philosophy of education, applied ethics, public policy, and the social sciences.

‘Professional Ethics’ has been offered as a compulsory course to undergraduate engineering students in a premier engineering institution of India. It was noticed that students’ perceptions and attitudes were frivolous and ornamental towards this course. Course instructors and institution authorities were motivated to find out the factors contributing to this awkwardness. For this purpose, a questionnaire was prepared and administrated to 336 students registered for the July–November 2014 semester. The study found two factors contributing to students’ indifference towards the Professional Ethics course. First, most of the students did not have self-interest to join the engineering programme, and while pursuing their study, they decided to switch to a different field upon completion of their engineering study. Second, students who desired to be engineers in their future believed that engineering code of ethics is not really referred to in most of the engineering jobs, and therefore Professional Ethics course is only meant for classroom discussions.

Engineers are observed as an archetype of people who carry out their professional tasks through rationality and quantitative aptitude. Thus, they do not consider themselves responsible for any sort of consequences their designed products have. But in contrast to their claim, many scholars argue that engineering products cannot be judged as value neutral as they are designed for public use. The product is good when people use it and get benefit from it and bad when tragedy occurs. The tragedy can be abated or possibly avoided if engineers would incorporate Emotional Intelligence (EI) into their professional task. EI is defined as "skills" that subsume self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Thus, not incorporating EI in the engineering task brings about unwanted tragedies. Against this backdrop, this chapter critically examines the salient features of EI, three models of EI, significance of integrating EI into engineering design, methods to learn and develop EI, and ethical implications of EI in engineering profession.