Hallelujah! using topical examples to illustrate Ethical and business issues for engineers

Technically-oriented undergraduate students are often reluctant to engage with “Legal, Social, Ethical and Professional Issues”. In particular many learners appear to have an increasingly cavalier attitude to intellectual property in digital media. Meanwhile local employers complain of graduates´ “unworldliness”. This case study describes the creation of a reusable learning object that uses topicality to make these issues seem more relevant to first year undergraduates in a School of Computing. Based on first delivery we identify principles for the design and maintenance of topical RLOs. One unexpected issue is how quickly topicality wanes and we identify that learners themselves are the best placed to identify future topical examples.