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Cybersecurity in liberal arts general education curriculum

Cybersecurity learning has been explored through different analytical lenses, across a range of grade levels and academic institutions. From attempts to standardize learning with accreditation to refining curricula and labs, there is currently considerable effort to create more programs in this discipline to address a million-job gap within the cybersecurity workforce. One primary challenge in cybersecurity education on the post-secondary level is offering experiential coursework to undergraduate students at liberal arts institutions. While such experiential coursework is already prevalent at research universities, smaller liberal arts institutions are still trying to gain a foothold into offering cybersecurity as a course of study. We address this issue with the design of an undergraduate course and cybersecurity learning modules that fit into the liberal arts education. First, we present the design of a general education course situated in a new educational paradigm, project CyberPaths, aiming at helping primarily undergraduate institutions with limited resources to introduce experiential cybersecurity learning. It takes advantage of experiential learning through a cloud infrastructure called Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). Then we describe our experience teaching this First Year Experience (FYE) course that exposed freshmen of different majors to cybersecurity. We present the design of pre- and post-course surveys, as well as focus group interviews that were used to evaluate students’ learning experience. Student feedback and direct observation suggest that incorporating flexible cybersecurity modules into general education coursework can be an effective vehicle to demonstrate importance and key concepts of cybersecurity to a diverse student population.