This presentation focuses on development of innovative blended online and face-to-face (F2F) bilingual international joint curriculum in information security and cyber warfare. We will focus on the lessons learned as a part of our initial activities. The need for cyber security training is obvious with attacks on information systems and neworks leading to potential critical infrastructure damage as well as health, safety, and economic impacts. There is a severe shortage of trained professionals in this field internationally. In addition, there are strong differences in the perceptions and practices on tackling information security problems across countries. Education is needed where students can benefit from multiple international perspectives and knowledge; there needs to be international cooperation to solve this worldwide problem to not only build capacity, but also bridge these differences. Russia and the US are seen as two leaders in the area of cybersecurity as well as the victim of many cyber threats. We hope that this joint program will help bridge the gap in perception and practices between the United States and Russia in the area of cyber warfare and information security. By working together, the curriculum will be able to utilize the strengths of the Russian and United States faculty in theory, practice, and pedagogic design and lead to a superior product. The courses developed in information security will utilize the best elements of each institution’s curriculum and supplement needed elements in the other's curriculum.
Information security education can be very difficult and has unique pedagogic challenges that include: rapid obsolescence of teaching material, a broad knowledge requirement for students, and lack of experts available to teach material. International collaboration introduces even more hurdles with travel costs, inconvenient meeting times and methods, and language and cultural differences. This presentation discusses an innovative joint collaborative program between a Russian and a United States university that tries to address these challenges.
In this program, students will be enrolled at their home institutions, but will participate in joint online courses and in an exchange program for language and cultural immersion at their host institutions. During the first year and prior to the actual student exchange, language training, curriculum development, and online distance deployment will be performed. Embracing online education for international collaborations allows reduction of travel costs for partnering institutions and students as well as allows more students to participate in such programs. It will also amortize the cost of developing this curriculum over a larger number of students. The first summer of the program will be highlighted by student exchange and face-to-face (F2F) learning. We believe that incorporating F2F training early on in an otherwise online curriculum will not only assist in offering hands-on learning consistent with constructivist paradigms, but also lead to improved language acquisition and cultural understanding; ensure integrity by some F2F assessment; as well as allow for a smooth transition to the online education experience.
The program will be offered for the first time in summer of 2012 and will be revised based on assessment data collected during its initial run. Design of curriculum is critical in ensuring that the right pedagogical elements are included in the course structure. Each course will be an equivalent of 3-credits with twelve 3-hour modules where each module will consist of an instructor lecture and other constructivist pedagogic elements such as short cases, hands-on exercises, laboratories, and short assessment quizzes. In addition, there will be a few longer cases and assessments that will be administered during the course. The courses will foster collaboration among participants through deliberate design of exercises and specific guidelines. Also, subtitles with translated text will be available for students with the lecture material leading to improved language understanding over time. By the time of the presentation, we will have developed four courses and the other three courses will be developed by the end of the academic spring semester. An initial list of courses and associated responsibilities proposed for the program is listed below:
1) Fundamentals of Information Security (Joint U.S. & Russia) that covers the fundamentals of information security and the different threats posed on the Internet;
2) Risk Analysis (U.S.) where students learn to do an in-depth analysis of information security risks of an organization both qualitatively and quantitatively;
3) Security Implementation (Russia) that covers security technologies deployed for ensuring information security including architecture, configuration, and deployment issues, as well as limitations;
4) Security Policies (Joint U.S. & Russia) where students learn to write and review security policies for organizations;
5) Digital Forensics (Joint U.S. & Russia) that covers analysis of informaiton security breaches and other incidents and focuses on the acquisition/ analysis /preservation of evidence collected from computers, networks and handheld devices;
6) Psychology of Security (U.S.) that introduces students to principles of human behavior that support and compromise information security focusing on three main areas: cognitive theories of human error, psychological tactics and methods used by cyber criminals, and the psychology of the victim;
7) Cryptography (Russia) covers both symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes and how they are used for data and e-commerce security.
The curriculum created will be evaluated both by subject matter experts as well as pedagogic experts. A series of instruments will be developed to collect data on the quality of the content, pedagogy, and student experience. These results will be disseminated in future work. The project goal is to develop bilingual blended curriculum, collect performance data, and refine our activities for future such collaborations. Our final objective is to apply what is learned with this program and to other joint academic programs internationally. International collaboration among educational institutions is logistically difficult; use of online media can facilitate partnerships that were considered infeasible due to financial or logistic difficulties. By relying heavily on online education for international collaborations,we can reduce travel logistics and costs for partnering institutions and students as well as allow more students to participate in such programs. By disseminating the same curriculum to other foreign partners and using the model to build other joint programs, we can fully utilize the strengths of the partner institutions, build necessary international partnerships and understanding, as well as amortize costs associated with obsolescence of material in such a fast-changing field.
