Usability is widely recognized as important to the design of security and privacy systems. Despite this, very few of the lessons learned through usable security and privacy research are taught to students as part of a security or computing curriculum. There are few educational materials, no consensus as to the knowledge units and learning objectives, and little research on how to best integrate usable security concepts into security curricula. The current project will follow a systematic instructional design process to analyze, design, develop, and evaluate a body of knowledge for education in usable security and privacy.
Investigators will lead a community of experts in determining and organizing instructional goals and knowledge units, along with the associated concepts, skills, and objectives. This body of knowledge will serve as a foundation for further curricular development throughout the usable security research and education communities. A subset of the body of knowledge will be evaluated through a set of online learning modules. Investigators will design and develop instructional strategies and novel learning materials for these modules, in order to evaluate them on students in various courses at multiple institutions. Evaluation of student use and learning with the modules will help examine how to actively engage students in usable security content in a variety of settings. The body of knowledge and online modules will be publicly available. Research results will enable further development of learning materials, courses, and research into novel instructional methods for usable security and privacy.
