Student Educational Learning Experience Through Cooperative Research

Abstract

Two state universities are working together on a two-part research project. The first part revolves around creating a learning experience for these universities’ students where they will develop key cybersecurity skills. They are tasked with creating and assessing fictional businesses to produce mock data that will be vital to the second part of this project. This will require them to develop a secure network architecture for their business along with security policies that consider the physical security of the organization not just the cybersecurity. The second part will be to design and develop a tool that will assist businesses in risk management. The created mock data will be used to test the tool during its development. We have hired students from both universities to work together to create several fictional businesses. These fictional businesses, once created, will be assessed using the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Security Evaluation Tool (CSET). This tool produces a report from a business security assessment that will be used in the second part of this project. The student workers are split into groups, each of which have at least one student from each university with different levels of expertise to ensure that students have the chance for peer-to-peer learning and to network with students outside of their university. The goal for the first part of this project is to help students develop cybersecurity skills through cooperative research.