Evaluating the Effectiveness of Online Cybersecurity Program in Higher Education
Maher Salem, Khalid Samara, Jeffery Pray, Mahmoud Hussein · 2024
There is a rapid growth of online cybersecurity programs in higher education and the increased acceptance of online degrees among students has invigorated higher education institutions to provide greater flexibility and access to learning for a wide range of students. Despite the popularity in online courses, online cybersecurity programs continue to display a series of challenges related to the lack of motivation to learn, technology problems, and difficulties in the interaction among learners-instructors. This paper sought to investigate these challenges to explore cybersecurity students' perceptions and experiences of studying a cybersecurity online program when used to supplement traditional methods to learn cybersecurity. In this exploratory design, we examine these issues through a mixed-methods qualitative approach from post-graduate students enrolled on a full-time online cybersecurity program which were collected in two phases. The first phase, qualitative data were gathered from a cohort of post-graduate cybersecurity students to participate in a workshop to obtain student learning and satisfaction for online learning. In this phase industry experts were also invited to the workshop to further probe students’ perspectives and experiences of online learning. In the second phase, a questionnaire was designed using both closed and open-ended questions to gather qualitative feedback from student's perceptions and experiences of online cybersecurity programs which identified common issues. In this study thematic analysis was conducted to identify the effectiveness of online cybersecurity programs by categorising emerging concepts as various coded data sets were assembled after data collection. The outcomes of the study revealed that online cybersecurity programs in higher education does achieve high success and attracts the attention of students, especially those in full-time employment, as distance learning provides adequate time to achieving a post-graduate degree. However, results revealed themes related to lack of effective communication, poor engagement, and time management. The results enabled us to construct a framework to inform and elaborate on a pedagogical strategy to develop an online learning cybersecurity program in higher education. Theoretical implications, and future research directions are also discussed