Experiential Cyber Education

Hands-On Training

A key to a competitive cybersecurity degree program, be it undergraduate or graduate in nature, is the amount of “hands-on” content included in coursework. Both industry and their prospective student employees require a significant amount of skills-based training that many degree programs lack. Such degree programs are meant to produce industry professionals that can make an impact immediately in an organization, not a theory-focused graduate that may pursue a doctorate. To this end, the authors recommend that course development for a fledgling program include substantial amounts of “hands-on” practice exercises, such as analyzing traffic with an open course protocol analyzer such as Wireshark. These exercises could be formal laboratory assignments, or graded homework exercises, but they must involve experiential learning and not be simply “cookbook” in nature. A platform that hosts virtual machines for student use, such as Practice Labs (https://www.practice-labs.com/), is a way in which institutions can avoid costly setup of hardware and software necessary for hosting hands-on content.