Every year in the U.S., 40,000 jobs for information security analysts go unfilled, and employers are struggling to fill 200,000 other cybersecurity related roles. Colleges and universities have created certificates, undergraduate, and graduate programs to train professionals in these job roles. This issue becomes more complicated when you explore the that competent workers in this field need more than just book knowledge to be effective. Engaged and experiential learning approaches encourages experimentation and expanding teaching cybersecurity beyond the use of just classroom lectures, textbooks, and PowerPoint slides. The use of experiential and scenario-based learning approaches helps students to develop real-world problem solving and critical thinking skills that demonstrate expertise beyond course grades and degrees. Developing the ability to strategic and adaptive is vital to be effective. This case study research intends not to reconstitute theory but to influence the practice of cybersecurity education through the use of innovative applied and engaged learning approaches.
TopEngaged And Action Learning
David Moore (2013) outlined how teaching approaches and interventions should “induce the learner to look carefully at her experience, to question her own assumptions, to place the experience in relation to larger institutional and societal processes and discourses, to hear others’ voices, to grapple with the question of why things happen the way they do, to imagine how things might be different, to read her experience in terms given by major social theories and to critique those theories from the perspective of her experience to engage, in other words, in serious critical thinking” (2013, pp. 201-202).
Engaged learning affords students with opportunities to engage deeply in their learning through high impact activities (Moore, 2013). These kinds of activities demand that students devote considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks to practice the transfer or application of knowledge across contexts (Moore, 2013). According to Moore (2013) in actual practice, actively engaged learning provides educational experiences that allow students to interact with other perspectives and voices, to receive frequent feedback about their performance, and to reflect on both that feedback and their learning.
According to Marquardt (2011), the crux of action learning, which is like engaged learning, comprises:
- •
Productive activities, actions, or interventions the foster and build individual and organization development through experiences;
- •
Problem-based learning that is driven and focused on real problems or areas of concerns that provide opportunities for reflection and education with and from their experience as participants attempt to improve things;
- •
An interactive process where participants have meaningful opportunities to make and comprehend meanings from direct experiences.
Marquardt (2011) outlined several interconnected reinforcing elements that make the use of action learning or engaged learning significant, including: