Date of Award
Summer 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Computer Science
First Advisor
Perouli, Debbie
Second Advisor
Brylow, Dennis
Third Advisor
Kaczmarek, Thomas
Abstract
The field of Cybersecurity, both in cybersecurity education and cybersecurity workforce demands, has been growing steadily as the dangers of cyber-threats continue to rise. The gap between the supply and demand of the cybersecurity workforce has been widening throughout the past decade. In response to the increased demand, many government agencies have actively engaged in collaborative efforts with higher education institutions to produce more capable graduates to address the need. However, with the various educational utilities available to instructors, few utilities offer content related to risk management, incident response, and disaster recovery practices. Furthermore, many students lack the awareness to assess the risks of their behaviors on the internet. They are unaware of methods they can use to protect their personal information and proprietary data from potential cyber threats. In response to the ongoing issue, I propose to create an adaptive educational framework that would assist the instructors and enable them to easily demonstrate relevant risk management practices, incident response, and disaster recovery to their students using any pedagogical approach. I argue that students exposed to the framework content will demonstrate increased knowledge of risk management, incident response, and disaster recovery practices. The statistical results presented by the T-tests performed against the student knowledge assessment ratings show that except for three questions within the survey, the responses to the remaining fifteen questions offered by the students demonstrated an increase in knowledge at the 0.05 significance level. The expected contribution of this dissertation includes increased cybersecurity awareness among students and an increased understanding of risk management, incident response, and disaster recovery. In addition, I contribute to cybersecurity education research by offering materials to help students establish proper cyber hygiene and standardized operational protocol to respond to cyber incidents and recover potential losses. The framework proposed within this dissertation also offers instructors and educators the necessary resources to ensure efficient learning, offer standardized feedback, and provide students with the opportunity to increase cybersecurity awareness while enabling the instructors to instruct these topics using the pedagogy approach of their choice.