Abstract:

This paper presents the design processes behind the creation and establishment of a novel MSc programme that is written in large parts to address shifts in national strategy and the international reality of cyber security. It presents the MSc programme as an effort to bridge the stated aims of national strategy and regional or industry specific skills gaps whilst delivering both core and transferable skills training. This process has not been without its challenges, and that is in large part to the programme being "first in country" to adopt some of the specific and relevant terminology being used to describe the course, its content and outcomes (e.g. cyber persistence, cyber resilience, defend forwards) in an academic context.

The paper looks at two challenge areas: Extrinsic (institutional) challenges and constraints on programme/syllabus design and Intrinsic (committee/team) challenges and constraints together with some of the successful measures that have been employed to counter them.

The particular requirements of a successful cyber resilience programme are presented, with specific focus paid to the derogations required from university policy on (for example) infrastructure usage around cyber security experimentation, with parallels drawn to other risk-containing subjects in the natural sciences including chemistry to make understanding the planning and organisations constraints as transparent as possible. The importance of involving less formal methods of trialling these derogations (including the establishment, and co-option, of a competitive cyber security club, some two years before the launch of the MSc) are presented as potential solutions when exploring these unknowns.

Aspects of the curriculum design process and team that differ from the norm found in higher education are highlighted and suggested as a way forward for anyone writing a curriculum with professional or use-case implications (if we are going to include a cyber-resilience consultant on our planning committee for this project, why isn't your French curriculum design team including a journalist who's published in the French language?), with the relevance of this committee's composition to the scaffolding and "i+1" of design to enable delivery that is supportive of the development of the course's future students.

Keywords:

Cyber security education, cyber resilience education, strategic priorities, skills shortage, professional students, programme design, postgraduate education.