4 / 2020-02-01 21:26:00

First Year Students’ Experience in a Cyber World Course - An Evaluation

First year experience,cybersecurity,Common Course,Experience Assessment,Outcome Evaluation

Although cybersecurity is a major concern nowadays, most students finish college without having learned a anything about it. To counteract, we developed Cyber World which introduces students to eight highly important cybersecurity topics and embedded it into our critical thinking Common Course (core curriculum). The Common Course is a team-taught first-year experience that is required to all students. Cyber World was taught in Fall 2018 to a cohort of over 150 students from various majors at the blinded for review. In this article we first present the idea and topics of Cyber World (which was primarily taught by none cybersecurity ex- perts). We then 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.