There is a capacity issue in the educational system preparing cybersecurity experts in this high-demand area: students cannot readily be added to the education system, especially at the Community Colleges level, because trained faculty to accommodate expanded sections are scarce. The weak link in the cybersecurity workforce supply chain is often the inability to find faculty who can be effective and can provide proper encouragement to the students to join the cyber workforce.
GW has developed one way to address this capacity issue by preparing a way to tap cybersecurity experts, with an initial emphasis on graduates of the NSF-sponsored CyberCorps program, as adjunct faculty. Such cybersecurity experts in the workforce have the potential to fill the need for part-time cybersecurity faculty at the Community College level. By tapping into the pool of working cybersecurity experts and retired individuals whose background fits the typical qualifications, a viable long-term strategy can be developed. The challenge is to outfit these technology-savvy individuals with pedagogical insights and skills, usually not present in this chosen population.
The Reach to Teach project, funded by the Department of Defense, was developed over the last two years with input from educators at both 2-year and 4-year institutions to explore this potential. The research effort engaged current faculty, as well as education experts, and resulted in a pilot Reach To Teach online course that was piloted in several workshops including the 2018 3CS Conference in Portland, OR. Reach to Teach includes six brief video sessions that can be viewed by prospective adjunct faculty, each of which includes the following content: introduction to community colleges, ethics, and pedagogy. The pedagogic content includes the general structure of a course, crafting goals and objectives, techniques for moving explanations from the concrete to the abstract, using group work using case studies, and using discussions in classes.
Reach to Teach is now ready to be used by the academic community. The program can be found at https://blogs.gwu.edu/seas- reachtoteach/ . There is no fee or cost associated with program adoption. For more information contact Principal Investigator Shelly Heller (sheller@gwu.edu) or co-Principal Investigator Costis Toregas (toregas1@gwu.edu ).
