Teaching in 25 years

The Centre’s teaching develops ethical competence: the ability to recognise ethical issues, understand different positions, weigh values, and justify decisions. Ethical issues are not the concern of philosophy alone; they form part of the responsibility of every discipline and profession.

University-wide Ethics Courses

The Centre developed the large university-wide courses Foundations of Ethics and Key Topics in Ethics. They introduce the principal concepts, problems and theories of ethics, engage students with classical and contemporary texts, and develop skills in argumentation, analysis and discussion.

Ethics Across Disciplines

Ethics teaching reaches students in philosophy, law, medicine, education, information technology, management, and many other fields. The Centre teaches pedagogical ethics, teacher ethics, and values education to education students, bioethics to medical students, and ethics to master’s students in strategic management. Discipline-specific teaching connects moral philosophy with the real choices and responsibilities of professional practice.

Education Beyond the University

The Centre organises training programmes, seminars and workshops for teachers, researchers, public officials, healthcare professionals, businesses, and other specialists. Research provides their intellectual foundation, while practitioners’ experience brings new research questions to light. Teaching, in turn, allows knowledge to be tested, refined, and developed further.

Learning Through Discussion and Case Studies

Alongside lectures, the Centre employs case studies, role-playing exercises, debates, values games, and other active-learning methods. Students analyse real-life situations, identify the values and interests involved, evaluate alternative courses of action, and justify their decisions. The aim is to develop the ability to act responsibly even when no single answer satisfies everyone.

Research Ethics for Doctoral Students

Since 2018, the Centre has taught the university-wide course Good Research: Framework Requirements, Values, and Principles of Action to doctoral students at the University of Tartu. It is offered in Estonian in the autumn semester and in English in the spring. The course connects the principles of research integrity with questions arising in researchers’ everyday work, including participants’ rights, data use, authorship, conflicts of interest, supervision, publication, communication, and responses to possible breaches.

The Centre also teaches research ethics to doctoral students at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and the Estonian Academy of Arts, to master’s students at Tallinn University, and at Tallinn Health Care College. This cooperation enables teaching to respond to the needs of different fields while resting on shared principles of good research.

Textbooks and Independent Learning

In 2025, the Handbook of Practical Ethics, compiled and edited by Professor Kadri Simm, received the award for the best Estonian-language higher education textbook. The first comprehensive Estonian-language research ethics textbook Good Research: A Textbook on Research Ethics for Higher Education will be published online in 2027. It was completed through the collaboration of 38 authors from various disciplines of research, makes research ethics more accessible and learner friendly. It can be used both within courses and independently, allowing readers to select topics relevant to their discipline, project, or career stage.

International E-Learning Course on Research Ethics and Integrity

The Centre for Ethics is developing an e-learning course on research ethics and integrity for biomedical researchers across Alliance4Life_Bridge partner organisations. Informed by a 2025–2026 survey and an expert-led ethics seminar at the University of Tartu, the course addresses the research community’s key needs and priorities. The course will be available through the project e-learning platform in December 2026.