Intelligently Developed Assessment for Cyber Training

By Milica D. Djekic

The creation of education and training is a quite trickery job requiring a lot of theoretical as well as practical skills. Right here, we would try to focus on cyber defense courses being the challenges of modern education. When you are thinking about developing the training session in cybersecurity, you should first pay attention to your possible audience and its needs. The question here would be how deep the pre-knowledge of your audience is and what outcomes your training session could cause. If you get an opportunity to assess these two parameters, you would easily make a chance to improve the quality of your course.

So, what we would suggest here is that you should start thinking about pre-course and post-course assessments that would offer you a clear idea of how your audience responds to your inputs. Also, you could attempt to take a survey and making the intelligent questions estimate how well the information you have prepared for your presentation cope with the needs of your audience. The cyber defense courses would usually include interactive classes using IT equipment as a way of transferring knowledge. If you have in mind any serious cyber defense presentation, training or course – you should definitely rely on the computers with the internet connection. In such a case, the trainer should use a projector in order to share his screen with the rest of the audience. Basically, that’s the situation with the interactive face-to-face courses. On the other hand, many companies would invest their resources into online training solutions and then they would let things go automatically in some sense.

Anyhow, the pre-course and post-course assessments would get recommended for a reason that would offer an opportunity to the presenters to improve their efforts. Also, those sorts of assessments could get used to grade the knowledge of the participants before and after the session and indicate how quickly the audience could absorb such prepared lessons. Finally, the point of this article would be to indicate how important the intelligently developed assessment within the education and training could be in increasing the quality of the session itself.

Anyone dealing with the preparation of the education and training session would claim that’s not the easy job. Either we are talking about the classical teaching lessons or skillfully prepared courses for some industrial needs – you would always cope with the same question which is how well the knowledge you presented to your audience could deal with its practical needs. The purpose of education is to prepare young people for life and their future careers. Similarly, the role of the business training session is to provide a skill to employees attending those classes. In both cases, the instructor could try to test the knowledge of the attendees before and after the session attempting to understand the impact of his effort. It’s quite well-known that the staffs would normally take an exam in order to obtain some certificate for a certain skill and such a degree would qualify them for being capable to obtain some tasks within their company. In order to pass that exam – the employees would study hard and finally make things happen.

The point is that every course should cope with some criteria and the role of the instructor would be to support the people to reach them. Teaching someone cyber defense is a big task and so commonly the trainers would believe that their attendees would deal with some sort of pre-knowledge. In order to confirm such an assumption – you should offer your students an opportunity to say something about their current situation in such a field. For that purpose, we would advise you to prepare some good pre-course assessments that would give you an opportunity to understand what your participants already know and what’s so significant to get in order to approach them in the most effective way.

Once you conduct your training session, it would be quite advisable to try to estimate your effort simply letting your attendees ask you the questions as well as giving them a chance to complete some sort of, say, 5-minute assessment. This would support you in getting the first-hand feedback that would help you create better and better courses. As we said before, the trainers are extremely skillful folks coping with plenty of research skills and well as with the good teaching qualities.

So, in order to produce the best possible courses – we would recommend following the ongoing tendencies as well as listening to the needs of your attendees. On the other hand, it’s so important to say that some brilliant training sessions would get offered as the online resources and their attendees could simply cope with them at home. These sorts of efforts could provide us the skills as well and their creators would also appreciate the good feedback from their attendees. The reason for that is more or less the same. Any sort of information is welcome in order to help the trainers realize where they are at that moment. It’s more like grinding the diamond – you would see its shine after putting a lot of efforts on. The similar situation is with your lectures and webcasts – you would become brilliant in your job after gaining more experience. In order to do so – you would need to interact with your audience. The feedback from your attendees could be so valuable and it can teach you how to get better and better. As time goes on – your skills would get more developed and you would be in a position to offer excellence to your hard work’s consumers.

Finally, it’s so significant to mention that you should make your assessments, tests, surveys, and quizzes getting so intelligent and you should also spend some time analyzing those efforts for a purpose of producing some intelligence. Such produced intelligence could drive your future courses and in combination with your research findings – it could provide you the brilliance. The point is – similarly as your students – you should work on your personal development and keep on with improving your skills because that’s the way to offer excellence to people you teach on. As we said – the shine comes after putting a lot of efforts on!

About the Author
Since Milica Djekic graduated at the Department of Control Engineering at University of Belgrade, Serbia, she’s been an engineer with a passion for cryptography, cybersecurity, and wireless systems. Milica is a researcher from Subotica, Serbia. She also serves as a Reviewer at the Journal of Computer Sciences and Applications and. She writes for American and Asia-Pacific security magazines. She is a volunteer with the American corner of Subotica as well as a lecturer with the local engineering society. She is a frequent contributing writer to Cyber Defense Magazine.