Introduction to Information Security: From Formal Curriculum to Organisational Awareness

Abstract

Many organisations responded to the recent global pandemic by moving operations online. This has led to increased exposure to information security-related risks. There is thus an increased need to ensure organisational information security awareness programs are up to date and relevant to the needs of the intended target audience. The advent of online educational providers has similarly placed increased pressure on the formal educational sector to ensure course content is updated to remain relevant. Such processes of academic reflection and review should consider formal curriculum standards and guidelines in order to ensure wide relevance. This paper presents a case study of the review of an Introduction to Information Security course. This review is informed by the Information Security and Assurance knowledge area of the ACM/IEEE Computer Science 2013 curriculum standard. The paper presents lessons learned during this review process to serve as a guide for future reviews of this nature. The authors assert that these lessons learned can also be of value during the review of organisational information security awareness programs.