Crushing the Canned Cybersecurity Course

How Today’s Scripted Curriculum Could Influence Tomorrow’s Incident Response

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that scripted curricula yield very different outcomes than unscripted ones.  That claim is not merely a matter of pedagogical style, but a question about the kinds of habits students develop when they are taught to move through learning environments that privilege compliance, repetition, and predefined outcomes over inquiry, interpretation, and collaborative meaning-making.  This argument is framed around my own experience first as a student and then as an educator teaching cybersecurity online at a public university.  I argue that in fields where ambiguity is unavoidable, those habits do matter.  They may shape not only how students learn, but also how they later respond when their responses to experiences in the real world exceed the reach of the script.