The Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute (JHUISI) will develop curriculum for predominantly undergraduate and liberal arts schools to broaden the path to STEM professions through Cybersecurity leaning. The National Science Foundation (NSF), under the Division of Undergraduate Education, awarded JHUISI $150,000 to support the three-year project. The goal of this project is to mitigate the challenges small institutions have in cybersecurity education such as limited resources and the inability to support the expensive infrastructure.

In partnership with Wofford College and the University of South Florida through a $600,000 collaborative grant, JHUISI will design cybersecurity educational materials and supervise and support capstone projects customized for liberal arts students.

Dr. Xiangyang Li, director of the Master of Science in Security Informatics program at the university’s Information Security Institute and a principal investigator for the NSF grant, said that the demand to study computer science and security informatics knowledge from students of other JHU schools and academic units has increased.

“The learning methods and materials to be created and examined in this project have the potential to address such demand in forms of courses and student research projects,” he said.

According to the NSF project proposal, students will be introduced to cybersecurity concepts through “manageable, stand-alone course modules and laboratory exercises.” Students can study further by taking two cybersecurity focused courses and cybersecurity capstone projects created by this project. The project will also use the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) infrastructure in the development of experiential labs and the capstone project assignments. GENI offers an affordable cloud solution to small institutions that lack the infrastructure to support sophisticated computer labs.

The first modules will be ready fall 2016 at Wofford College.

“It feels great to use the strength of JHUISI in cybersecurity education and research to help small liberal arts colleges. This project can also have rippling effects on the JHU campus and beyond the university,” said Li