Over the past months, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges in the global education sector on different levels, calling for the full digitilization and remote delivery of courses and programs, while many institutions are not fully prepared for such a situation. Although the global educational sector has attempted to react promptly to such a new situation, it is widely accepted that existing solutions have introduced a number of security and privacy concerns, as remote delivery increases the chances for sensitive student and teaching staff data to be exposed to cyber threats. Moreover, digitilizing and not only digitising the education implies adjusting the pedagogical models of the respective courses, to enhance interaction and minimize passive learning, which in turn introduces further challenges in terms of security and privacy.
INCIDENCE aims to address those challenges at two levels. On the educational level, by developing and delivering a novel cyber hygiene framework, tailored to the requirements and characteristics of HEI distance learning and teaching, and on the infrastructure level by offering a safe to use eLearning toolkit reflecting on modern eLearning pedagogies and state of the art cybersecurity and privacy advances. Such solutions will empower both teaching staff and students with knowledge on maintaining a high level of cyber hygiene and new capabilities to respond to potential threats that may arise.
To support the above, the project will produce four main outputs.
- A Gamification Cyber Hygiene Training framework,
- A Scenario Based Learning (SBL) eLearning toolkit,
- A MOOC course to disseminate, in a wide audience, the framework and toolkit derived from the previous outputs,
- A set of best practices and techniques to improve the security of virtual
rooms and learning management systems.