Crowdsourcing cyber experts to determine relevant topics during cyber curriculum development efforts

ABSTRACT

The cyber security environment, its threats, and its defence strategies are constantly changing. Educational programmes and their curriculum are known to be slow changing and at times out-of-date, resulting in content that may not be as relevant to their students and the industry. This research paper will 1 – present an overview of the curriculum development (CDev) process when using committees and their hindrance, 2 – describe the concept of crowdsourcing and its benefits when using domain experts, 3 – propose a Curriculum Development using Crowdsourcing Framework (CDC-F) to integrate expert crowdsourcing into parts of the CDev process (specifically the identification of industry-relevant topics and sub-topics for further curriculum content development), and 4 – present the process and results of ang experiment utilising the CDC-F.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert crowdsourcing
• requirements determination
• needs assessment
• curriculum development
• cyber security education
• engineering education

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian K. Ngac

Brian K. Ngac, CCISO, CISSP, CISM An Instructional Faculty member for the Information Systems & Operations Management Academic Unit at George Mason University’s (GMU) School of Business with teaching areas of responsibility focused in the fields of information security management and business process improvement. In addition to his experience in academia, he has over eight years of experience in Application Security, Cyber Policy and Assessment, Process Improvement, RDT&E Program Management, & Training in the industry.

Mihai Boicu

Mihai Boicu, PhD Associate Professor in Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University, and Associate Director of the Learning Agents Center. Grants totalling over $10M with a personal allocation of more than $3M. Research dissemination in over one hundred peer-reviewed publications including two books, three textbooks, two book chapters, seventeen journal articles, co-editor of workshop proceedings and journal special issues.