First year students’ experience in a Cyber World course – an evaluation

As cyber threats endanger everyone, from regular users to computing professionals, spreading cybersecurity awareness becomes increasingly critical. Therefore, our university designed an innovative cybersecurity awareness course that is freely available online for students, employees, and the general public. The course offers simple, actionable steps that anyone can use to implement defensive countermeasures. Compared to other resources, the course not only suggests learners what to do, but explains why and how to do it. To measure the course impact, we administered it to 138 computer science undergraduates within a compulsory information security and cryptography course. They completed the course as a part of their homework and filled out a questionnaire after each lesson. Analysis of the questionnaire responses revealed that the students valued the course highly. They reported new learning, perspective changes, and transfer to practice. Moreover, they suggested suitable improvements to the course. Based on the results, we have distilled specific insights to help security educators design similar courses. Lessons learned from this study are relevant for cybersecurity instructors, course designers, and educational managers.

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“…• Course impact: Does the course change students' view on preparedness and education regarding everyday cybersecurity (cf. [3])? If so, how?…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Want to Raise Cybersecurity Awareness? Start with Future IT Professionals.

Kraus

Švábenský

Horák

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education v. 1

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“…The BCS has established and defined accreditation standards (2019) proposes embedding a compulsory common course for 574 all first-year students across all disciplines. Their evaluation 575 shows promising results (Breitinger et al, 2021).…”

Section: British Computer Societymentioning

confidence: 99%