2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The major impact of Covid 19 on learning was shifting from in-person to digitized learning. This change played a significant role in the university students’ learning and the environment that they were learning. The learning environment and how such environments impact learners is a major factor in learning. There is a broad range of environmental factors that include but are not limited to personal devices such as cell phones, computers etc. as well as physical environmental factors such as work, family, sports friends etc. that may impact learners’ education. The research on environmental factors impacting cybersecurity students learning has been focusing on applications of cybersecurity in different environments instead of the environmental factors impacting students’ learning. For instance, students are observed to be motivated to practice information security if they perceive high levels of severity, response efficacy, response costs and self-efficacy in cyberspace [1]. Psychological factors impacting pedagogy of cybersecurity education is discussed in [2] with its impact on students learning. Exploration of influencing factors in cybersecurity major or career choices is limited and most of the literature focuses on correlation of personality traits, academic performance in traditional STEM subjects such as math and science, and environmental factors such as parents, teachers, counselors, and socio-economic influences [3]. Students having little to no exposure to cybersecurity education within traditional middle school and high school curriculum and environments is pointed out as one of the environmental factors in K12 education [4]. Understanding environmental factors that impact university-level cybersecurity education and investing in fixing relevant issues that exist to apply corrective actions may play a significant role in the future of not only cybersecurity professional environment but also students’ choices of cybersecurity education.
In this research, the aim is to investigate environmental factors impacting cybersecurity students’ learning of cybersecurity major related concepts. 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 environmental factors impact (i.e. motivate or discourage) you to enjoy (i.e. like or dislike) an online course?
2. What factors in your life impact your learning in cybersecurity?
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. Yoon, C., Hwang, J. W., & Kim, R. (2012). Exploring factors that influence students’ behaviors in information security. Journal of information systems education, 23(4), 407-416.
2. Taylor-Jackson, J., McAlaney, J., Foster, J. L., Bello, A., Maurushat, A., & Dale, J. (2020). Incorporating psychology into cyber security education: a pedagogical approach. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: FC 2020 International Workshops, AsiaUSEC, CoDeFi, VOTING, and WTSC, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, February 14, 2020, Revised Selected Papers 24 (pp. 207-217). Springer International Publishing.
3. Emerick, G. J. (2020). Factors that influence students to choose cybersecurity careers: An exploratory study (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
4. Shein, E. (2019). The CS teacher shortage. Communications of the ACM, 62(10), 17-18.