IEEE CertifAIEd™ Curriculum Licensing

AI is being deployed in every sector of the economy, and universities are under growing pressure — from accreditors, employers, regulators, and students themselves — to prepare graduates who can reason clearly about its ethical implications. The IEEE CertifAIEd™ AI Ethics Course Curriculum responds to that need with a rigorous, standards-based course that aligns with major governance frameworks, including the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and that prepares students to apply the IEEE CertifAIEd methodology in practice.

IEEE owns the intellectual property for the curriculum and licenses it to universities and other accredited institutions for use in their degree and certificate programs. Licensing terms are tailored to institutional size, format, and duration of use. Students whose programs include the licensed curriculum are eligible for a discounted fee on the IEEE CertifAIEd professional certification exam when they are ready to pursue certification.

The curriculum is organized into six thematic modules delivered across a 15-week semester, scaffolding from foundational ethics through applied AI ethics, governance, and emerging frontiers:

Each week features a 75-minute content session and a 75-minute interactive session, with case studies, labs, and workshops that ground theoretical concepts in current, real-world examples.

The curriculum is explicitly aligned to the four IEEE CertifAIEd™ criteria suites — the same four domains the professional certification evaluates — so that students graduate with working fluency in the framework they will encounter in industry:

• Transparency: values embedded in a system’s design and the openness of choices made during development and operation.
• Accountability: clear responsibility for AI outcomes, even as systems learn and adapt.
• Algorithmic Bias: prevention of systematic errors and repeatable behaviors that produce unfair outcomes.
• Privacy: respect for the private sphere of individuals, groups, and communities.

Students apply these criteria directly through a simplified CertifAIEd Ethical Impact Assessment on a real, deployed AI system — a capstone exercise that mirrors the professional CertifAIEd methodology and gives graduates a concrete artifact to show employers.

The curriculum is delivered as a complete, teach-ready package. Licensing institutions receive:

• The full 15-week course outline, with learning objectives, topics, case studies, and curated readings for every week.
• Slide decks for all 15 weeks, plus introductory and assessment-overview presentations.
• Instructor notes for every session, including timing guidance, discussion prompts, and facilitation tips.
• A complete assessment suite: five assessment types with rubrics, prompts, and grading guidance.
• The IEEE CertifAIEd Ethical Impact Assessment template — a simplified, undergraduate-adapted version of the professional methodology.
• A customization guide with seven discipline-specific tracks (Computer Science and Engineering, Business and Management, Law and Policy, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Media and Communication, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Education).
• A curated library of suggested AI systems for student assessment, organized by discipline.

All suggested readings are open access, removing cost barriers for students and simplifying adoption across diverse institutional contexts.

The curriculum is designed for undergraduate deployment across any discipline. There are no technical prerequisites, and the course is suitable for first- through fourth-year students. It has been built for flexible use as:

• A required or elective general-education course fulfilling ethics, technology, or society requirements.
• The ethics component of a Computer Science or Engineering degree, in response to ABET or equivalent accreditation requirements.
• A standalone AI ethics and governance course within Business, Law, Healthcare, or Liberal Arts programs.
• A signature interdisciplinary course at institutions with strong cross-faculty traditions.
• A licensed course for international campuses and branch campuses with growing demand for AI ethics education.

The course uses five scaffolded assessment types that build progressively across the semester, giving institutions defensible, varied evaluation evidence for accreditation and giving students a visible arc of skill development:

The curriculum draws on a plural set of ethical traditions — Confucian, Buddhist, Ubuntu, Islamic, Indigenous, and European philosophical lineages among them — treating each as a substantive source of moral reasoning about technology in its own right. Students learn to analyze AI systems through multiple frameworks and to recognize how cultural context shapes what a society considers fair, accountable, or trustworthy. Case studies are selected for analytical value rather than to single out any particular government or region, making the course suitable for diverse student populations, international and branch campuses, and institutions serving globally mobile learners.

Licensing institutions benefit from association with IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization, and from alignment with the IEEE CertifAIEd™ program — the only professional certification for AI ethics competency backed by the IEEE Standards Association. Graduates of the course enter the workforce with a recognized framework for ethical analysis and a clear pathway toward eventual IEEE CertifAIEd professional certification.