Facilitating an accessible environment for teaching cybersecurity to technologically diverse students

Author and presenter

• Lachlan Hardy, University College, CoBE

Abstract

One of the difficulties with teaching technology is giving equitable access to students to facilitate their success: this difficulty is exacerbated when teaching fully online. Students often don’t have the same starting point: where one student may have a laptop that’s brand new, another might have a 12-year-old one - but they both need to run the same software to pass the units. This challenge created difficulty in the cyber security teaching space as the software can be quite varied and there are many hardware requirements. In many cases this results in students expressing frustration at not being able to fully participate in their education: an accessibility issue. Solving the challenge required directly talking to students across the semester and implementing adaptive solutions to solve their individual needs. This was unsustainable long term – often requiring many hours of technical support for a single student – so exploration of alternative options was necessary. The main requirement was equity of access for students, and a solution was found for the cyber security space enabling students to have an equitable learning experience regardless of their technological starting point. This process highlights a challenge for technology-based online education: that we cannot assume students have the technology required, and nor can we assume that they will get access at any point in their education. Solving this issue requires long-term direct discussion with students and an open approach to solving their wider accessibility problems, without which we may be consigning many potential students to the educational shadows.