Initial Design Principles for an Educational, On-line Information Security Laboratory

Conceptual Model of Online Pedagogical Information Security Laboratory: Toward an Ensemble Artifact

“…Similarly, the collaboration of EPI stakeholders such as developers with stakeholders of other entities such as teachers and end users is very important for developing an effective artifact. The ensemble artifact will, in this way, emerge through an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort of experts from different fields [5].…”

“…should be considered in order to align the program goals with the lab activities. Thus, the lab infrastructure should support all the exercises required in different courses of a degree program of information security [5]. 5.3.2.…”

“…Furthermore, feedback from students was also obtained. The interviews, observations, literature review, and reflection on the pedagogical approach (personalized system of instruction, PSI [22]) helped us to derive an initial set of design principles to guide the design and development of an online InfoSec lab [5]. The initial design principles (Contextualization, Collaboration, Flexibility, Cost-effectiveness and Scalability) were derived keeping in view the hands-on exercises requirement of an information security course.…”

“…The review [4] also shows that the literature studied for this research mostly focuses on the tool view of online InfoSec labs by providing mostly the technical details of the labs. The lack of explicitly described pedagogical approaches and concrete design principles for designing and developing online InfoSec labs in the existing literature hinders the accumulation of technically and pedagogically rigorous knowledge [5]. Hence, there is a need to understand the nature of the online InfoSec labs as ensemble artifacts [6] because just a black-box tool's view is not enough [7].…”

“…The ensemble is defined as a "web of equipment, techniques, applications, and people that define a social context including the history of commitments in making up that web, the infrastructure that supports its development and use, and the social relations and processes that make up the terrain in which people use it" [7]. Action Design research (ADR) [6] can be employed to conceptualize the ensemble artifact as a result of emergent perspectives on design, use, and refinement in context through continuous interaction between technology and organization during the process of design [5]. A stream of researchers [6], [8]- [10] propose that information systems research must respond to a dual mission by making theoretical contributions and providing assistance in solving the current and anticipated problems of practitioners.…”