Course Material Selection Rubric for Creating Network Security Courses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rubric with criteria of timelessness, associability, and simplicity to assist university teachers, especially at smaller institutions, in selecting appropriate and effective network security course materials.

Contribution

It presents a novel rubric framework that standardizes material selection for network security courses, addressing challenges faced by smaller universities.

Findings

The rubric improves material selection efficiency.

It helps teachers choose relevant and up-to-date content.

The framework supports course development in diverse educational settings.

Abstract

Teaching network security can be a difficult task for university teachers, especially for teachers at smaller universities where the course loads are more diverse. Creating a new course in network security requires investigation into multiple subject areas within the field and from multiple sources. This task can be daunting and overwhelming for teachers from smaller universities because of their requirement to teach multiple subjects, not just network security. Along with the requirement of teachers to understand the material that they wish to teach, the factors of obsolescence and the ability to build material off of core topics need to be addressed. These three factors are difficult for a smaller university teacher to address without a set of standards to analyze these areas. A rubric addressing these topic areas of timelessness, associability, and simplicity has been created to assist in the selection of materials based on the three criteria. The use of this rubric provides an effective means to choose material for a new course and help teachers to present the material they determine most appropriate to teach.