Teaching cyber security course in the classrooms of nmims university

Abstract

The paper aims at implementing new pedagogy and assessment practices from rigorous literature survey perusing quality papers and articles. The appropriate pedagogy and relevant assessment always go hand in hand. One cannot achieve effective teaching by compromising the other component. In engineering, pedagogy and assessment play extremely important roles. In recent years, engineering education has lost track of the big picture of what the curriculum has to be. In Computer Science Engineering, the course contents often change according to the demands for new technology in the market. Adhering to this fact, the courses must be designed either practical-based or case study based. Rote teaching-learning methods are not as effective as far as the curriculum design in the computing field is concerned. Cyber Security is one such course where students are expected to learn how to create a protective environment for computing and computing resources. The course must be designed in such a way that, students must learn how to identify the vulnerabilities in computing resources and methodologies to mitigate them. This course aims such that students must learn some popular attacks which help them to identify what are the possible ways from where the attacks could happen. The paper makes use of strategic assessment tools for the Cyber Security course (Taught to post-graduation students) and discusses outcomes through course outcome attainment analysis as per the threshold value of attainment set by the Computer Engineering Department to adhere to the accreditation standards. Through course attainment analysis it is observed that, Viva voce assessment tool is not suitable for evaluation of the course as it does not impose the technical details and working of Cyber Security concepts. The overall attainment was 55.55% which is 15% less than the threshold set by Computer Engineering Department.