Professionals in the cybersecurity field are in high demand. Many sectors, including the research, military, civil law enforcement, corporate, and private sector communities, all benefit from a larger, highly skilled cybersecurity workforce, particularly considering the increasing number and sophistication of cyber attacks. Challenges for academia include producing diverse and high quality professionals, and unfortunately, the demand for cybersecurity professionals far exceeds the supply of students. Community colleges can play a crucial role in meeting the demand for cybersecurity professionals. This project uses problem based learning, an innovative approach to teaching cybersecurity, to bring community college students into the high rewarding cybersecurity field. The educational methods and products developed through the project will be broadly applicable, beyond community colleges, and will contribute to a better trained and more diverse cybersecurity and research workforce. Ultimately, the project will contribute to the health, safety, and economic well being of society by protecting the nation's cyberinfrastructure.
The overall goal of the project is to provide vocational training in cyberinfrastructure security to community college students, to address the shortage of technical staff in cybersecurity. Community colleges have a significant student population of low income, diverse, first generation college students that have the potential for enabling a new stream of cybersecurity professionals. These colleges, however, face significant challenges to teaching advanced cybersecurity skills for cyberinfrastructure. To address these challenges, the project will develop vocational training modules on cyberinfrastructure security. Each module will consist of multiple micro-modules and target the skill sets required for entry level jobs in the cybersecurity field. Specifically, the approach involves three major tasks. The first task involves creating training modules on several offensive/defensive topics on cyberinfrastructure, including network penetration testing and digital forensics. The contents of the modules support problem based learning with a strong hands on components. The second task involves developing CRICE (Cyber Range Infrastructure for Cybersecurity Education) on NSFCloud to support problem based learning. NSFCloud is an NSF funded public cloud service available for research and training purposes. This will help community colleges to utilize the training modules effectively without requiring their own expensive computing infrastructure. The third task involves integrating the modules into the curriculum of two community colleges and evaluating the effectiveness of the problem based learning and CRICE in terms of cost, ease of adoption, student learning gain, and attitudinal survey on the students' experience. The project research contribution lies in exploring the effectiveness of problem based learning for vocational training in cybersecurity in the context of community colleges in the United States. The project will show that problem based learning is effective in providing both conceptual and practical understanding of cybersecurity topics. This project is funded by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program in NSF's Division of Undergraduate Education is providing co-funding for this project in recognition of its contribution to education in community colleges.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
