Reach to Teach: Preparing Cybersecurity Experts as Adjunct

Community College Faculty

Rachelle Heller

, Costis Toregas and Lance Hoffman

The George Washington University, Department of Computer Science, Washington DC, U.S.A.

Keywords: Active Learning, Cybersecurity, Community Colleges, Faculty Development, Learning Environment.

Abstract: While the nation should maintain and expand the educational capabilities in cybersecurity given the current

high demand for this sector, currently there exists a capacity issue: students cannot readily be added to the

education system, especially at the Community Colleges level, because trained faculty to accommodate

expanded academic demand are scarce. Cybersecurity experts in the workforce have the potential to fill the

need for part-time cybersecurity faculty at the Community College level. The challenge is to prepare these

technology-savvy individuals with classroom pedagogical insights and skills which not usually part of a

cybersecurity experts skillset.

A research question for this development project is “Can we use an online environment to provide pedagogy

training for potential adjunct community college faculty.” Currently, the Reach To Teach project is exploring

this possibility through a research effort engaging current faculty, as well as education experts, and a pilot

Reach To Teach online course that is being made available to these cybersecurity experts. The Reach to Teach

pilot is a set of six sessions, each of which includes the following: introduction to Community Colleges, ethics,

and ideas for classroom pedagogy (e.g. the general structure of a course, crafting goals and objectives,

techniques for moving explanations from the concreate to the abstract, using group work using case studies,

and using discussions in classes).

The team hosted a content review with community college educators and the pilot has been evaluated by 12

members of the target population. Their suggestions for improvement included. In addition to addressing these

concerns, the revised pilot includes a modified interactive experience, Viewers are now able leave comments

that can be read and replied to by course leaders or other individuals viewing the material.

1 THE NEED

In order to maintain and expand capabilities in the

world of cybersecurity – whether planning new

technologies for the internet of things (IoT),

preparing defenses, constructing offensive tactics, or

developing appropriate policies – a well-educated

workforce is needed (Gray, 2016; Heritage

Organization, 2013; NSF 2013; The White House,

2014). In the United States alone, to fill available

government jobs which the Department of Homeland

Security indicates is in the many thousands,

numerous pathways have to be opened including on

the job training, community college programs as well

as traditional four year and graduate programs. Each

of these avenues educates and trains individuals to

https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000

work at different levels and in different capacities in

our ‘cyber’ world.

The most recent Cybersecurity Commission

Report (Cybersecurity Commission, 2016) includes

Imperative 4 which addresses building workforce

capabilities. As they note, building such a workforce

is not possible without an education pathway for

potential members of the cyber-workforce. Currently,

there is a capacity issue: students cannot readily be

added to the education system, especially, at the

community college level, because trained faculty are

scarce. The weak link in the cybersecurity workforce

supply chain is often finding faculty and teacher

effectiveness. Therefore, the success of Imperative 4

depends, in large part, on the capacity of our

educational institutions and capabilities of our

educators.

338

Heller, R., Toregas, C. and Hoffman, L.

Reach to Teach: Preparing Cybersecurity Experts as Adjunct Community College Faculty.

DOI: 10.5220/0007612603380343

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 338-343

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

One solution has been the National Science

Foundation (NSF) supported Scholarship for Service

(SFS CyberCorps) program both at the university and

now the community college level. The SFS Program

provides scholarship funding for students in the areas

of cybersecurity. All recipients are required to work

within the Federal, State, Local or Tribal Government

as a cybersecurity professional for a period of time

equal to the length of the scholarship So far, however,

graduates have primarily gone to federal government

agencies, national labs, or Federally Funded Research

and Development Centers.

Community colleges are institutions of higher

education, typically two-year experiences that have

an “open enrollment” for students who have

graduated from high school. A community college

usually provides workforce education as well as

college transfer academic programs. The nation is

looking to our community colleges as an untapped

source of cybersecurity workers for the various

workforce needs. According to the NSF,

“Community colleges can play a critical role in giving

students the hands-on skills that are needed on the

front lines (of) defending computer networks,

(Heritage Organization, 2013)”. And, while some

community colleges have existing programs in

cybersecurity and have dedicated full time faculty,

according to the Center for Community College

Student Engagement, more than 58% of community

college classes are taught by adjunct faculty.

Although the data is not broken out by discipline,

informal conversations with local community college

leaders revealed that they rely heavily on adjunct

faculty, and most of these have no teaching

experience when they begin. Lankard (1993) says

part-time faculty are employed primarily for their

professional competence rather than their

pedagogical training, therefore many lack the

teaching skills and teaching experience required to

ensure instructional integrity in the classroom. In fact,

“No formal preparation for a teaching position is

required other than the desired academic credential”

Twombley and Townsend (2008, p15) and for

students who complete a community college

education is the quality, preparation, and pedagogical

skills of the faculty have to be central. According to

the American Association of Community Colleges,

there has been huge growth in the percentage of

higher education faculty teaching in community

colleges and the biggest group contributing to that

growth are the part time faculty.

A typical advertisement indicating the

requirements for a cyber-security faculty member at

a community college includes: Bachelor's degree

(Master's preferred) and five years of work

experience as a Computer Forensics professional.

They are also expected to have technical

qualifications and certifications such as: CompTIA

Network+, CompTIA Security+, CISCO

certifications, CISSP, SANS, Certified Ethical

Hacker (CEH)), as well as a knowledge of

Programming Languages, excellent written and oral

communications skills, experience in leadership

including a history initiating and managing change,

working with others toward shared goals and

developing others.

Nearly 4 in 10 students in higher education attend

a community college. A typical community college,

unlike a student in a 4-year research university or

liberal arts college, are employed at least part-time,

have a family, are enrolled only part time, or a

combination of all three. Personal and global

economics have a great deal to do with an individual’s

choice to attend a community college as they offer a

lower cost option and different time demands. As a

group, community college students are not as

homogeneous as students in four-year programs.

Many entering community college students are older

than 19-year-old freshmen in 4-year universities, and

more are returning students seeking new employment

opportunities. Community college students can have

bachelors or advanced degrees, and are likely

working full- or part- time with huge demands

(including children) on their non-class time. The

community college student, like every student, is not

monolithic –some are more prepared that others but

as a group they are like other students; however, their

experiences provide them with choices towards either

a terminal degree or as a pathway as a stepping stone

to a 4-year institution or are enrolled at both a

community college and a 4-year at the same time

using the community college to fill in gaps (thereby

often ‘serving two masters’).

2 FILLING THE NEED

The Reach to Teach pilot focuses on the more than

2,200 nationwide SFS CyberCorps alumni, all of

whom have at least a bachelor’s degree and most have

a master’s degree (some even a PhD). They are highly

educated and have unique experiences that they can

bring to the classroom. These men and women, as

current or former government employees, have had

access to the latest technologies, wrestled with the

current problems and policies facing the nation, have

taken leadership roles and have a wide network upon

which to rely for developing academic and career

Reach to Teach: Preparing Cybersecurity Experts as Adjunct Community College Faculty

339

goals. Even those who have left government service

usually work with cybersecurity content on a daily

basis. Graduates from the 2013 cohort, and before,

have at least 5 years of cybersecurity work experience

The pilot program for Reach to Teach concept

offers SFS cyber-experts the opportunity to

participate in this online program with the expectation

that they will consider working with one of their local

community colleges as an adjunct faculty member.

As noted above, cyber-experts have the requisite

cybersecurity content knowledge and experience to

teach at this level. However, they typically do not

have teaching experience or knowledge of diverse

classroom learning and assessment techniques.

Furthermore, most are not (yet) a product of the

community college pathway and they do not

understand the community college student and their

challenges/opportunities.

Educator capacity building is built upon

classroom research. The Reach to Teach pilot

provides an asynchronous, online course to build

teaching capacity as framed by (Newmann et al.,

2000; King and Newmann, 2004) research. This work

asserts that educational change requires

improvements to staff knowledge, skills and

dispositions. Reach to Teach coursework is designed

to build faculty capacity in key areas such as

assessment, curriculum resources, expectations for

students, building sense of self-efficacy, learner

characteristics, legal obligations, and the use of online

learning to support individual and collaborative

projects. Reach to Teach uses Angelo and Cross’

(1993) Classroom Assessment Techniques to support

participants’ ability to facilitate learning. Typical

classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) which are

short, anonymous assessments such as requiring

students to complete a one sentence summary of

material, or a student-generated list of real-world

applications, have been demonstrated to increase

faculty-student interactions and active classroom

participation (Angelo and Cross, 1993; Morris, 1994;

Samanta, 1994; Simkins, 2018)

3 REACH TO TEACH

3.1 The Six Sessions

Reach to Teach is designed to address target faculty

expectations concerning the pedagogy for successful

classroom teaching. This is crucial because an

educator’s expectations for their student is critical for

student success (Newmann et al, 2000).

The content of this course provides background

information and learning experiences to build an

understanding of the community college

environment, the

student body and the related learning

opportunities. The material addresses the following

questions:

 What is the role of a community college in

cybersecurity career preparation? What do

employers expect from community college

students and their preparation?

 What support do community college students

need to advance – those who are less experienced

as well as those with experience?

 What opportunities can be provided to develop

each student’s skills, while still offering the most

dedicated students a chance to pursue their

academic interests as fully as possible?

 What challenges and benefits does classroom

diversity bring to classroom discussions and

projects?

 How do you harness the community college

students’ life and work experiences to improve the

classroom and projects?

 What pedagogic tools are worthwhile in this

setting?

Cyber-experts who complete Reach to Teach would

be in a position to serve both as technically and

pedagogically prepared adjunct faculty. This

potential increase in available adjunct faculty would

enable the education of more cybersecurity students

which would in turn add qualified workers to the

cybersecurity work-force in numbers higher than

currently possible. As the cyber-experts move into

adjunct teaching positions at community colleges, the

community college students will benefit from the

intellectual and employment experiences of cyber-

experts who were previously not adjunct faculty at

community colleges.

3.2 Development of the Online Reach

to Teach Program

In the fall of 2017, we convened an online focus

group of Community College faculty and researchers

and one face to face workshop of community college

faculty, 4-year CyberCorps faculty and teacher

education faculty to provide detailed direction on the

learning science and resources to include in the

course. The workshops and follow-on work resulted

in actual teaching strategies and units for Reach to

Teach. The online focus group produced a scope and

sequence chart. The face to face, 2-day workshop in

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

340

January 2018 found the resulting chart too

complicated and overly pedantic. The result of the

workshop was a revised scope and sequence chart, of

which Sessions 1 and 2 are shown in Figure 1.

Topic Time Session 1 Session 2

Introduction 3 min.

Community

College Context

5 min.

Legal and

Ethical Issues

5 min.

Ethical

concerns in

the classroom

Definition of

plagiarism

Instructional

strategy

27 min.

Setting

Objectives

Going from

concrete to

abstract

Applications 7 min.

Assessment 5 min.

Formative

assessment

Feedback and

Performance

Assessment

Engaging

students

5 min. Ice breakers

Providing

Support

Review 3 min. Review Review

Figure 1: Sample Scope and Sequence: Sessions 1 and 2.

3.3 Pilot

Based on the results of the online discussion group

and the workshop, a series of 6 sessions were

sketched out. Requests for interviews on first person

experiences were made to community college

colleagues. Community College leaders were

interviewed concerning the mission, benefits and

challenges of teaching at a community college.

Content was gathered that was consistent with the

scope and sequence developed after the face to face

workshop. Videos available on You-tube and other

sources were included to avoid re-inventing the

wheel. The content of the six sessions, presented in a

very simple Power Point series with minimal layout

and with video snippets, was reviewed by our two

community college experts of the grant. Before

handing the material over to a graphic artist to prepare

the distribution version, it was imperative to resolve

two issues – how to make the sessions independent of

a leader but at the same time have an interactive feel

and how to make the sessions easily accessible. While

the latter was readily addressed by storing the Power

Point sessions on a public Dropbox, the former was

more of challenge.

Reach to Teach encourages active learning in the

session discussions, but without a moderator it would

be difficult to support true active learning. And,

creating the materials that would depend on a

moderator limited, we believed, the access to the

materials themselves. “Students” would have to be

gathered into some sort of cohorts and the sessions

run on some schedule. Our vision was more of an

independent resource that could be used in the true

engineering education concept of ‘just in time

learning’ (Simkins, 1994). The decision was to ask

questions during the sessions and encourage the

students to think about their answers before

proceeding to the next slide or to do the homework

before the next session. In either case, subsequent

slides asked the students “Did you think of this?” and

suggested a few possible answers or homework

solutions.

With these two issues (temporarily) resolved, the

graphics expert prepared a template for all sessions.

The consistent look and feel of the visuals contribute

to the ‘moderator independent’ structure of Reach to

Teach. Additionally, the templates make edits and

revisions easy to accomplish. Finally, all sessions

were narrated. Final versions were distributed for

evaluation.

4 EVALUATION

As noted above, while pedagogic training is important,

there is typically no required classroom training for adjunct

faculty and therefore nothing against which we might

compare our material. If there is training at all, it is related

to forms and procedures of the college than to pedagogy.

Some community colleges encourage that departments

assign mentors to new adjunct faculty. Our evaluation

was based on multiple reviews: content literature

review, content validation with adjunct coordinators

at community colleges, content refinement through

community participation, and content review by

community participation. Feedback in these

categories was received from educators and potential

students.

The content validation was achieved by reviews

from working adjunct and permanent community

college faculty through the online blog and through

conference workshops and presentations. The

sessions were made available online

(https://blogs.gwu.edu/seas-reachtoteach/). (The

authors continue to welcome comments from readers

who access these sessions. A comment sheet is

available at the site). The sessions have been

informally reviewed at one Community College

Cybersecurity Conference (3CS, 2018) and were well

received.

A team of students, who were not part of the

design or development of the 6 sessions created an

evaluation rubric (Figure 2) and shared the sessions

Reach to Teach: Preparing Cybersecurity Experts as Adjunct Community College Faculty

341

with 12 SFS CyberCorps alumni, the typical target of

the project. Of the 12, none had ever taught at the

community college. One had been a teaching assistant

during some graduate work, but was responsible only

for grading homework, not for creating a lesson. All

indicated they thought they might enjoy teaching at a

community college. None felt that they would be

teaching in the next six months, but would consider it

in the future. Respondents reported that they required

about an hour to review the material and comment the

evaluation form. Since the sessions themselves are

about an hour long, it seems that reviewers may not

have watched every moment of the various videos.

Figure 2: Survey Questions for Each Session.

The survey review yielded 4 positive outcomes.

All respondents agreed that the learning objectives

were clear and the course organization was such that

all students could participate fully. Reviewers

positively commented concerning the course content

and the novel aspects of the session(s).

For example: “I Strongly Agree; Teaching and the

history of community colleges was interesting;

Highlighting the importance of class objectives

having observable results was immediately useful”

“It (sic the session) provided examples of what the

instructor is trying to teach. The embedded guest

presentations were very engaging the iterative

approach shown for refining objectives was engaging

and felt useful”.

There were two categories of outcomes to be

addressed to improve the sessions. The editorial ones

were easily resolved and they included correcting a

broken link and a typo or two. One comment

suggested the annotated video about the structure of a

lesson could be removed, but others considered it

valuable. Suggestions for improvements included

adding closed captioning, suggested moving the

password discussion and expanding the discussion on

case studies for clarity on the importance of goals and

objectives for their use.

One of the biggest challenges continued to be how

to make the sessions as interactive as possible without

requiring a leader or a cohort structure. We are

currently reviewing Annoto

(https://www.annoto.net/) as a tool to provide

asymmetric interactivity to the site. Figure 3 shows

the opening of Session 1 with the interactive

comment icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Figure 3: Reach to Teach.

Figure 4 indicates what the system looks like

when a viewer has left a comment or started a

dialogue.

Figure 4: Asynchronous comments and replies.

5 FUTURE WORK

The sessions are now readily available and we expect to

host a wide-reaching field study to determine whether the

cybersecurity experts can, and will, use these sessions. And,

if they do use them, do they find them useable and useful

for their adjunct teaching experience.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Reach to Teach was developed at the George

Washington University under a grant from the

Department of Defense: Grant# H98230-17-1-0371

Special acknowledgements go to Cole Weinhauer,

Stephen Salas and David Matcham

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