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

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A Correction to this article was published on 11 September 2020

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Abstract

Although cybersecurity is a major present concern, it is not a required subject in University. In response, we developed Cyber World which introduces students to eight highly important cybersecurity topics (primarily taught by none cybersecurity experts). We embedded it into our critical thinking Common Course (core curriculum) which is a team-taught first-year experience required for all students. Cyber World was first taught in Fall 2018 to a cohort of over 150 students from various majors at the University of New Haven. This article presents the evaluation of our Fall taught course. In detail, we compare the performance of Cyber World students to other Common Course sections that ran in parallel and conclude that despite the higher workload students performed equally well. Furthermore, we assess the students’ development throughout the course with respect to their cybersecurity knowledge where our results indicate a significant gain of knowledge. Note, this article also presents the idea and topics of Cyber World; however a detailed explanation has been released previously.

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  • 11 September 2020

    The published version of this article unfortunately contains blinded information.

Notes

  1. https://www.loyola.edu/academics/computer-science/degrees/non-majors

  2. https://niccs.us-cert.gov/about-niccs/glossary

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Acknowledgements

The work reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after Mr. Davis’s retirement as chairman of Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc. We acknowledge the following faculty from the University of New Haven who participated in teaching the Cyber World Course: Ibrahim Baggili, Guy-Serge Emmanuel, Michael French, Glenn McGee, and Matthew Schmidt.

Funding

This work was supported by the Davis Educational Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Davis Educational Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Haven, 300 Boston Post Rd, West Haven, CT, 06516, USA

    Frank Breitinger, Ryan Tully-Doyle, Kristen Przyborski, Lauren Beck & Ronald S. Harichandran

  2. Hilti Chair for Data and Application Security, University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Frank Breitinger

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  1. Frank Breitinger
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  2. Ryan Tully-Doyle
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  3. Kristen Przyborski
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  4. Lauren Beck
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  5. Ronald S. Harichandran
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Correspondence to Frank Breitinger.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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The original version of this article was revised: (1) In the 3rd paragraph, 1st line of the Introduction, the “blinded review” in the sentence “At the blinded for review, University of New Haven...” must be removed. (2) In the 5th line of the same paragraph, “[ref blinded for review]” is changed to [Przyborski et al. 2019].

Appendix: Rubric

Appendix: Rubric

Table 6 Rubric used to evaluate project proposal
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Breitinger, F., Tully-Doyle, R., Przyborski, K. et al. First year students’ experience in a Cyber World course – an evaluation. Educ Inf Technol 26, 1069–1087 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10274-5

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