Cybersecurity Index for Undergraduate Computer Science Courses in the UK

Abstract

The paper proposes a novel index to classify how well UK Computer Science courses articulate cybersecurity related content through their course/module pages. The aim of this work is to raise awareness among British Universities to pay more attention to include and standardise cyber security content in computer science courses. Our results show that 80% of analysed courses scored 1 or 2-stars on a 5-Stars scale. The results also suggest the need of a formal delivery of cybersecurity content from the first year of the courses and possibly in a collaborative manner with the British Computer Society (BCS). To emphasize cybersecurity education in mitigating security lapses, the analogy is: it is better if most people know how to use a match than to train many fire-fighters.

Cybersecurity in the Digital Classroom: Implications for Emerging Policy, Pedagogy and Practice

“…Recent cybersecurity education literature has focused on developments in cybersecurity curricula [19,26], qualifications and accreditation [20,23], pedagogy and practice [18,22] to increase the number of cybersecurity professionals, in both the UK and internationally [21,24]. There has been little research published to date on the online learning, teaching and assessment environment as a cyber target in its own right.…”

Prelims

“…Recent cybersecurity education literature has focused on developments in cybersecurity curricula (Association of Computing Machinery, 2020;, qualifications and accreditation Crick, Davenport, Irons, Pearce, & Prickett, 2019), pedagogy and practice (Crick, Davenport, Hanna, Irons, & Prickett, 2020;Irons, 2019) to increase the number of cybersecurity professionals, in both the UK and internationally (Irons, Savage, Maple, & Davies, 2016;Ruiz, Shukla, & Kazemian, 2020). There has been little research published to date on the online learning, teaching and assessment environment as a cyber target in its own right.…”