Cybersecurity Education, Research & Outreach Center

CReST

CyberWorkshops: Resources and Strategies for Teaching Cybersecurity in Computer Science

 

This project (NSF Award# 1438861) is a collaboration between Tennessee Tech University and Towson University. The project team will address cybersecurity workforce issues by improving faculty expertise in cybersecurity. This will be accomplished by a series of workshops for computer science faculty that will be taught by cybersecurity faculty. The workshops will provide faculty with teaching resources and prepare them to incorporate cybersecurity concepts into their courses. The project will be funded by the Division of Graduate Education through the Cybercorps:SFS program.

Modelled after the successful Tapestry project for high school CS teachers (developed at the University of Virginia), through a series of workshops across the nation, the project team will develop a community of trainers (faculty in cybersecurity) with skills and resources to organize professional development workshops for computer science faculty. CReST workshop participants and cybersecurity faculty will share security integration strategies, research-based practices, and field-tested security resources. In the context of this project, workshops will focus on dissemination of course materials developed as part of the Security Injections @ Towson and the SecKnitKit projects. The project will also facilitate dissemination of other effective security educational resources developed by security faculty across nation. The direct effect will build a community among CS faculty teaching security and significantly increase faculty awareness and understanding of secure coding concepts. This will lead to an increase in the number of students with cybersecurity knowledge and skills, increase student ability to apply secure coding principles , and increase student awareness of security issues in core computer science subject matters such as software engineering, database, networks and operating systems. Project evaluation will include pre-workshop and post-workshop surveys, workshop observations, and aggregation across all workshop participants.