We are identifying similarities and differences between teachers’ and creators’ perspectives about what makes cybersecurity educational material effective and engaging to students. To achieve this objective, we conducted a comparative study with Canadian teachers of tweens between the ages of 11-14 who have previously taught cybersecurity and privacy to their students, and individuals who have experience creating multimedia educational resources around cybersecurity and privacy.
Description:
As online resources are entangled more and earlier into childrens' lives, the importance of effective education in cybersecurity and privacy continues to grow, bringing with it the need for well-designed and effective resources for teaching these topics. In this work, we explored how existing resources align with the needs of teachers using them. We conducted two qualitative interview studies with 15 teachers and 8 resource creators, and found that while there was good alignment between teachers and creators about design preferences and understanding of the classroom context, teachers still struggled to fit cybersecurity and privacy topics into their teaching schedule. Teachers tended to approach teaching security and privacy from a safety-oriented (rather than technical) perspective, and often did so on an ad hoc basis, as a reaction to external events in the classroom, school, or community. In our interviews, resource creators generally had a good understanding of the classroom teaching needs of teachers and the learning needs of their students. They were particularly aware of teachers' constraints relating to teachers' need to adhere to curricular expectations, and the technical challenges teachers face in incorporating technical resources in the classroom. However, the results of our interviews suggest that cybersecurity and privacy resources could be made more effective by consistently applying design methodologies, structuring content into modular lessons that teachers could use flexibly, supporting discussion as the primary method of assessment, incorporating stories and real-life content for students, and keeping the design of materials up to date.