| Summary: | Distance education and e-learning in the field of information security is gaining popularity. An online information security programme is supposed to include plenty of hands-on exercises, but in most cases the lab experiments are unavailable to distance students that represent a challenge in online education. In information security education, virtual labs facilitate hands-on learning in distance education. An online information security lab is an artefact which involves a collection of systems and software used for teaching information security, and which is accessible through the Internet. However, the design, development and implementation of an online InfoSec lab has many challenges. This research is motivated from an on-going information security lab development initiative at Luleå University of Technology (LTU).Thus, the researcher focused on the question of how we can design a pedagogical online InfoSec lab which is flexible, usable and adapts to different educational contexts. The current literature about online InfoSec labs still lacks well-specified pedagogical approaches and concrete design principles. This hinders the accumulation of technical and pedagogical knowledge for the implementation and use of online educational InfoSec labs. Moreover, the literature focuses mainly on details of technical lab implementations, whereas the pedagogical elements of the curriculum and the rationale behind them were ignored. This leads to inadequate guidance about how the instructor and the learner can make use of the lab to pedagogically align the course objectives, teaching / learning activities and assessment methods. In order to design an online InfoSec lab to improve flexible hands-on education and security skills development the Action design research (ADR) approach was chosen. The ultimate goal is to design an ensemble IT artefact as a result of emerging design, use, and refinement in context through continuous interaction between technology and organization during the design process. Following the ...
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