The University of Tulsa hosts a teacher workshop that’s part of a National Security Agency–funded program to help address a critical cybersecurity worker shortage.
Math department chair Bill Coberly said cybersecurity is no longer a foreign concept.
"Most of us have experiences with failures of cybersecurity on a scale from personal to the government to international terrorism, so the whole subject pervades our experience in our society nowadays," Coberly said.
teachers will integrate cybersecurity into their lesson plans, though it doesn’t have to be as cerebral as teaching seventh-graders cryptography.
"Simply knowing, being aware of your personal and your family interaction with your correspondence by email, whether it's the internet of things, knowing that your car, appliances, your service providers are using internet technology to communicate with devices," Coberly said.
According to some estimates, the U.S. is 600,000 cybersecurity professionals short of what it needs. Coberly said cybersecurity is important on several fronts.
"Whether it's the financial systems, our electric grid, our national defense in the military sense, preserving our corporate information and technologies, keeping those private from other countries is a big item," Coberly said.
Last year, 29 universities ran NSA-funded Generation Cyber — or GenCyber — workshops last year.
Note: KWGS is a licensee of the University of Tulsa.
