A Study on Effective Instructional Design for IoT Security Education Focusing on Experiential Learning

Abstract

This paper discusses about effective instructional design for fostering security engineers, especially focusing on experiential learning. The authors prepared two groups, the proposed experiential learning group (experimental group) and non-experiential learning group (control group), and investigated each learning effectiveness by using several evaluation metrics. The evaluation metrics included pre-/post-test scores, delayed-test score and learning motivation score. The result of statistical evaluation was that there was no significant difference about pre-/post-test scores and also learning motivation scores between the two group. However, there was significant difference about delayed-test scores between them. This interesting result explains that the learners in the both groups had higher learning motivation and they actually acquired knowledge about cybersecurity in each lecture, nevertheless, almost learners in the non-experiential learning group couldn't keep to retain the knowledge they acquired several weeks ago, meanwhile almost learners in the experimental learning group could keep it. This result indicates that experiential learning can influence learner's knowledge retention and has possibility to bring long-term knowledge retention than the case of non-experiential learning. Although the fact was empirically known among most lecturers, this experiment proved it based on statistical quantitative evidence. The contribution of this paper is the quantitative evidence. The result of this paper provides one of the evidences that instructional design including experiential learning brings superior learning effectiveness for cybersecurity education.