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According to the survey of information security by Datapro Research Corporation, 50% of information security events were occurred due to human carelessness/negligence. In corporations, employees are vulnerable to threats of information security. Since they might not be aware of threats and unable to react or handle them instantly, their companies would thus suffer a great loss. CSI computer crime and security survey shows poor security awareness training in public and private sectors (Collins, 2010). 43.4% respondents stated that less than 1% of their security budget was allocated to awareness training. Of course it’s reasonable to consider that effective awareness training is inherently less expensive than the arsenal of security technology that most enterprises use to employ defense-in-depth. Nevertheless, 55% respondents stated that the investment made in awareness training was inadequate (CSI, 2009).
Increasing the awareness and response to Information Security has been a top issue. Many e-learning courses and materials about Information security have been supplied, for example, AOEMA.org, noticebored.com and honeytech.com, etc. Most of them are shown in multimedia and in the basis of hierarchical list or click to browse, but the correlations between both units and concepts are seldom revealed.
We have learned that knowledge maps have great impact on the learning performance, procedure of teaching and learning, conception building and correlating (O’Donnell, Dansereau, & Hall, 2002). For this reason, we manipulated Knowledge Maps as an auxiliary tool for designing e-learning materials for Information Security Awareness and expected to enhance the performance for the behavior of learning.
In the paper, we tried to discuss if the implementation of knowledge maps in designing Information security e-learning materials lead to a higher learning performance than that of browse-based ones. Taking the weakness and threat of E-Mail security awareness, with great losses reported, as an example, we built a knowledge map- based structure for the e-learning materials and further discussed if the learning performance would be increased in the way. The purpose of the study is to construct a knowledge map for e-learning materials of Information Security Awareness to be accessed on-line and verify if it can improve the learning performance effectively. We expected to compare the performance of knowledge map-based and browse-based materials under the same contents (in the case, Information Security Awareness) and thus to see if either one of them can help strengthen the awareness of information security and lower the frequency of related events.