The Importance of Ethics Within Cybersecurity Education
Learning various technical cybersecurity skills without an ethical framework for those skills leaves students without a benchmark for their future actions. In order to establish guidelines for new cybersecurity skill sets, graduate students who are seeking an Information Security Management certificate at the University of Memphis are required to take a course in Cyber Ethics. The Cyber Ethics course is a quarter of the four-course set that students are responsible for completing during the certificate program and has been recognized by the National CyberWatch Center as a 2017 Innovation in Cybersecurity Education.
During the Cyber Ethics course, students learn about digital policy from many perspectives, taking into account the sovereign law of different nation states. Students take on the role of a fictitious company from the United States that is looking to establish locations in foreign countries. Each student is allowed to select countries of a particular interest to him or her and research how the company would need to behave in order to expand there.
Throughout the course, students learn the reality of how ethics play a huge part in how digital companies expand into new territories. They are required to deal with all issues they find and present their findings to other class members for critique during a question and answer session.
The overwhelming majority of students involved in the Cyber Ethics certificate program have raved about the experience, indicating that they learned about cyber ethics from the vantage point of many countries, not just the United States. They learned exactly why ethics are so important for international business. Many students also expressed a great deal of satisfaction in viewing the reports of their fellow classmates, and stated that the learning experience was much more intensive than traditional textbook learning. They also retained more of the information found during their individual research and presented to them during the various class presentations.
If you want to learn more about this Cyber Ethics course, read page 10 of the National CyberWatch Center’s Innovation in Cybersecurity Education.
FULL SUBMISSION (pg.10 in National CyberWatch Center’s Innovation in Cybersecurity Education):
GLOBAL CYBER ETHICS AND EFFECTS ON CYBERSECURITY
Graduate students seeking a certificate in Information Security Management are required to take four courses, one of which is Cyber Ethics, the course involved in this description.
Students were given a scenario in which they identified some type of fictitious U.S. company that was considering adding a work location in other countries. Each student selected countries of interest to them and reviewed a wide range of relevant information they found online. They identified issues that were important for their company and ranked each into a category. Their final product involved calculations and justifications for their final decision in their top two selected countries. Each student presented their findings to other class members and handled responses to audience inquiries.
BENEFITS:
Students indicated that they learned a great deal about other countries’ policies as to acceptable behavior and other information relevant to considering those locations as additional sites for their fictitious organization. In addition to their own results, they gained considerably from other students’ reports. Students indicated that they retained much more of the information by searching for it themselves rather than from reading a textbook.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Judith Simon jsimon@memphis.edu
(901) 754-2248
University of Memphis
TRANSFERABLE:
Yes, this innovation is transferable to other institutions.
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