Cybersecurity threats continuously evolve, becoming more sophisticated, relentless, and hard to detect with each attempt. Helping the WashU Community learn how to recognize, avoid, and report these threats is crucial to protecting our institution, our research, and our people from bad actors who seek to steal and hold ransom the information and resources on which we all depend. A dynamic and engaging approach to cybersecurity training has never been more critical.
Traditional training methods (e.g., an hour-long annual training) produce content that has several drawbacks:
- It doesn’t hold the audience’s attention.
- It overwhelms the audience with too much information all at once.
- Learners do not effectively internalize, generalize, and apply the content.
- It does not keep pace with the evolving threat.
The Office of Information Security respects your time and vows not to waste it. We will deliver actionable training that directly relates to the threats our community is currently facing. We’ll make it short, semi-sweet (i.e., the delivery will be palatable, but we won’t sugarcoat the reality of the threat), and to the point.
We’ve adopted a “microlearning” approach to help the WashU Community get the most out of cybersecurity training. Rather than an annual training, community members will receive regular, short (2-7 minutes), focused, engaging training on timely topics with recommendations that folks can immediately put into action at work, home, and on the go.
This approach has several significant benefits:
- It is flexible, accessible, and engaging.
- It results in better retention and application of new knowledge in real-world situations (Le et al. 2023).
- We can tailor our monthly microlearning to the needs of the WashU Community.
- The WashU Community will be better informed and up-to-date on trends in the threat landscape.
We hope you’ll find the microlearning approach refreshing, informative, and a good use of 2-7 minutes a month. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions for topics of interest or improvements to our approach. Reach us at infosec@wustl.edu.
Le, D., C. Matsuda, S. Pena, I. Platou, T. Olsen (2023) https://escholarshare.drake.edu/bitstreams/9c18f82a-91e3-45f4-9625-45d84a307fc4/download. Drake Management Review 13(2).