Announcement
In today's world, almost anyone who uses information technology at work, at home, or at school can benefit from at least basic education in cyber threats and cyber security methods, tools, and principles. Additionally, much of the workforce needs more sophisticated education to prepare them to deal with cyber threats and defensive tools that are changing rapidly. Government agencies, private companies, and educational institutions are all addressing these educational needs, or beginning to. Of particular interest to the US Department of Homeland Security is training of the homeland security workforce: US DHS has 200,000 employees and the homeland security enterprise (HSE) broadly speaking has millions. Whatever is developed for the HSE will also be very valuable for workers in the private sector, and ultimately for the general public. A DHS-funded project at CCICADA aims to: identify important cyber security educational efforts; categorize or classify them; lay out recommendations for a cyber-security education initiative for US DHS; and define an educational research program that would strengthen the nation's cyber security initiative.
As part of the initial work in developing the recommendations, CCICADA and DIMACS are hosting a "brainstorming workshop" on Cyber Security Education on October 7, 2013 at Rutgers University. In addition to traditional educational formats, this workshop will explore "outside the box" approaches such as approaches based on analogies to medical student education, use of smart devices, and online learning, as well as analogies to teaching good health behavior, energy-efficient behavior, etc. The recommendations DHS seeks must be based on sound educational theories/principles, indicating that a major part of the discussion will be on how to best construct an educational framework for all cyber security education and how to assess its effectiveness. This preliminary "brainstorming" workshop will bring together university, industry, and government researchers and education experts to explore the important educational principles to design different kinds of programs, such as courses, short courses, webinars, refreshers, and units, as well as discussing and exploring relevant existing efforts.