SecTech

Inspiration

Given the mounting level of cyber threats facing Europe, a coordinated cybersecurity education effort becomes more urgent than ever. The malware waves hitting Europe in 2017 give a clear warning of the dangers lying ahead, ranging from criminal activities to often state sponsored theft of intellectual property and a rising possibility of cyber sabotage. Those developments have also increased the demand for cybersecurity experts in an already virtually empty market. It is obvious that an increased supply of talent becomes an absolute necessity if Europe as a whole shall improve cybersecurity for society and economy, and meet the high aims set in recently passed legislation such as the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, a joint and well-coordinated European approach to education in this field is still missing.

Given the diverse areas such as information and communications technology, management and organization, law, economics, sociology, criminology and psychology, it becomes painstakingly clear that a wide range of expertise needs to be accessed. 

Innovation

In line with those developments, the Erasmus+ strategic partnership project SecTech aims at collaboratively developing a European cybersecurity curriculum. The core motivation of SecTech is to provide a seed curriculum, including ready-to-use online teaching materials, to give European academic institutions a much better starting point for implementing and delivering a cybersecurity education program, either on their own or in cooperation with other institutions.

The primary contributions the project are aimed at supporting the integration of knowledge that is currently available across Europe, the introduction of a curriculum template, the provision of online course materials that can serve as a core, and finally the establishment of an online repository and cooperation platform that can provide basis for a Europe wide joint educational effort.

Impact

The SecTech project is acting as the starting point to develop and share cybersecurity course materials, and to establish open-source standards and systems for delivery based on Moodle and SCORM. The consortium aims to trigger Europe wide collaborations in offering cross-border teaching and build a sustainable education community for not only academics but also professionals.