Research project INCIDENCE – promotINg Cyber-hygIene in eDucation through sEcuring distaNCe lEarning

Over the past years, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges in the global educational sector on different levels. It has called for the full digitalization and remote delivery of courses and programs, while many institutions are not fully prepared for such situation.

Although the global educational sector has attempted to react promptly to this new situation, it is widely accepted that existing solutions have introduced a number of security and privacy concerns. Remote delivery increases the chances for sensitive student and teaching staff data to be exposed to cyber threats. Moreover, digitalizing and not only digitising the education implies adjusting the pedagogical models of the respective courses. We need to enhance interaction and minimize passive learning, which in turns introduces further challenges in terms of security and privacy.

INCIDENCE aims to address those challenges at two levels. Firstly, on the educational level – by developing and delivering a novel cyber hygiene framework, tailored to the requirements and characteristics of distance learning and teaching in higher education institutions. Secondly, on the infrastructure level by offering a safe to use e-learning toolkit reflecting on modern e-learning pedagogies and state of the art cybersecurity and privacy advances.

Such solutions will empower both teaching staff and students with knowledge on maintaining a high level of cyber hygiene and new capabilities to respond to potential threats that may arise.

To support the above, the project will produce four main outputs: 1. a Gamification Cyber Hygiene Training framework, 2. a Scenario Based Learning (SBL) e-learning toolkit, 3. a MOOC course to disseminate, to a wide audience, the framework and toolkit derived from the previous outputs, and 4. a set of best practices and techniques to improve the security of virtual rooms and learning management systems.

This is an EU project with a large number of external researchers involved from the following organizations:
Massive Dynamic, Sverige
International Hellenic University, Grekland
University of Western Macedonia, Grekland
SIDROCO Holdings, Cypern

This project has been funded by the European Commission’s ERASMUS+ programme under agreement number 2020-1-SE01-KA226-HE-092518.