2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Social factors that impact cybersecurity university students’ understanding of major-specific concepts are important to understand to advance their education. There is very limited investment in pedagogical research of cybersecurity students’ learning based on the impact of social factors on these students from a conceptual-learning perspective. The research literature focuses on cybersecurity students’ awareness of cybersecurity events [1], factors effecting cybersecurity awareness [2], the role of social media for increasing social media risk awareness [3], cybersecurity awareness in online education [4], and education of students to increase awareness of cybersecurity based on emerging social media [5]; Majority of the relevant literature research focuses on factors impacting cybersecurity aspect of media rather than how students use social activities to learn cybersecurity concepts. Cybersecurity education is expanding throughout the United States, and in the World, with a tremendous growth over the past decade. Hence, understanding students’ ways of using social interactions such as social media, YouTube, friends, family etc. after determining their best interest in social learning environment in this emerging field is necessary to investigate.
In this research, the aim is to investigate cybersecurity students’ social media learning environments and their effectiveness as well as the impact of their social activities to learn major-specific concepts. There is no pedagogical study to the best of my knowledge that aims to understand cybersecurity undergraduate students’ while socializing to learn major-specific content and the impact of socialness on their education.
The research is conducted in one of the public universities in the Northeastern region of the United States to obtain the results presented in this work. IRB approval is attained to conduct the research. Qualitative and quantitative data is collected from cybersecurity students; The quantitative data is the numerical data attained from more than 150 students based on the following two research questions:

1. What factors do you believe impact your social interactions in an online course the most?
2. Which of the following factors in social media are impacting your interest in the cybersecurity field?

The qualitative data is collected from 20 students with a voice recording during the interviews. Each student received an incentive to participate in the interview. The interview targeted to learn details of the participant survey responses of the students with additional follow-up questions to understand the details of their written responses to the questions. Statistical calculations form the quantitative results while qualitative results rely on the voice-recorded interviews. This research is currently in progress and a summary of the results will be included in the abstract once it is completed.

References
1. Bhatnagar, N., & Pry, M. (2020). Student Attitudes, Awareness, and Perceptions of Personal Privacy and Cybersecurity in the Use of Social Media: An Initial Study. Information Systems Education Journal, 18(1), 48-58.
2. Alqahtani, M. A. (2022). Factors affecting cybersecurity awareness among university students. Applied Sciences, 12(5), 2589.
3. Alqurashi, D. R., Alghizzawi, M., & Al-Hadrami, A. (2024). The Role of Social Media in Raising Awareness of Cybersecurity Risks. In Opportunities and Risks in AI for Business Development: Volume 1 (pp. 365-376). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
4. Erendor, M. E., & Yildirim, M. (2022). Cybersecurity awareness in online education: A case study analysis. Ieee Access, 10, 52319-52335.
5. Amankwa, E. (2021). Relevance of cybersecurity education at pedagogy levels in schools. Journal of Information Security, 12(4), 233-249.