What is AGORA?

AGORA is a web-based tool for education in ethics and technology. AGORA has been developed as part of an ICT innovation project, which has been undertaken by a consortium of the three Dutch Universities of Technology (Delft University of Technology, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and University of Twente) and has been financially supported by the Dutch SURF Foundation. AGORA is a web based-framework that makes education more attractive to students, and enables the joint development of education at different universities.

By using AGORA, students will acquire the following competences:

• Awareness of the ethical aspects of technology
• Applying ethical concepts to concrete cases
• Structuring and analyzing moral cases
• Forming a moral opinion and giving a structured argumentation for this opinion
• Placing ethical problems in context
• Ethical deliberation

Agora offers teachers the possibility:

• To develop jointly cases and exercises for students, and to use cases and exercises of other teachers for their classes
• To use and make a rich variety of exercises in a quick and effective way, which train the different required moral competences
• To gain insight into the shortcomings of student’s competences, so that they can focus on these during their lectures
• To give feedback on students’ work in a way that is not too labor intensive
• To grade student’s work in an effective way
• To use the Agora software for their lectures by reviewing questions and discussing answers of students.

AGORA 2

Agora 1 was launched in 2004. Extensive testing and evaluation of Agora 1 has shown that, according to most teachers and students, Agora has an important added value in teaching ethics and technology. However, the program also had a number of shortcomings and was not user-friendly enough. Accordingly, a new version of Agora has been developed which was launched in April, 2006. The most important changes compared to Agora 1 are:

• A new interface and navigation structure that is much more user-friendly and intuitive for both students and teachers
• After logging in, teachers can immediately start to give feedback and grade exercises and make new courses or exercises
• The Dutch and English versions contain about 10 standard exercises that can be very easily used by all teachers and that built up in didactical complexity. Also a large number of cases and analyses models is included. In the course of 2006/2007, new exercises and cases will be added that include video fragments.
• The terminology has been simplified as to make Agora better understandable for new teachers
• Exercises and analysis models have been shortened because a major complaint was that they were often too long
• The new version of Agora contains an easy-to-use online manual. Also a paper version of the manual is available
• Old courses can now be archived
• Agora 2 is also available in Japanese. The program now has multi-language support. New languages can be added very easily.
• All known bugs have been solved
• All existing courses, exercises, cases etcetera made by teachers in Agora 1 have been transferred to Agora 2 and can still be used

Partners in Agora

Agora has been developed by the three technical universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and University of Twente). The project management of Agora has been embedded in the joint Centre for Ethics and Technology of the three technical universities.

Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan is a special partner to the project. It will use Agora for its courses in ethics and technology (about 1500 students each year). To this end, Agora has been translated into Japanese and adapted for use in Japan. KIT will also market Agora in the rest of Japan.

License for Agora

Starting September 2006, a licensing fee for the use of Agora has to be paid. To this end, a licensing structure for Agora has been established on a non-commercial base. For more information, contact Martin Peterson.

Training course for using Agora

Institutions that are interested in a course for using Agora, can contact Martin Peterson.