Many Australian universities are famous, not only for the quality of teaching and research at their institutions but also the figures leading their schools, and often the industry, at the same time. With the withdrawal of international students from face-to-face learning since the start of 2020 and the translation of their courses to online, many of our partners find themselves facing the challenge of how to embed their time-poor but brilliant academics into their online courses in a sustainable and scalable way. In 2020/21, Curio partnered with a Group of 8 university, who were moving their hugely successful foundations course in Cyber Security to the online environment. The academic leads had effectively embedded a social learning model where students co-created and shared a “class textbook”, security tips and case studies that built upon content covered in lectures and readings. They sought a partner who could embed the enigmatic personalities of their academic leads and effective social learning model into the new delivery mode to reach their students across the globe. Our approach to this project was to focus on design workshops with the lead academic to determine key design priorities and outcomes for learners. We discovered early on that the objective of the course was to build not only cybersecurity skills and knowledge but more importantly, for learners to develop a security mindset. Our design priorities in the course were to:
- Build-in guiding voices that formed the foundation of the learning
- Provide opportunities for the learner to build on this individually and together.