How to create a course syllabus - Cybersecurity Awareness Program

I share my screen in this episode, so you may want to check out the video version of this podcast at https://www.heathermonthie.com/how-to-create-a-course-syllabus-cybersecurity-awareness-program/

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How to create a course syllabus. 

So in this video, I'm going to show you how to create the course syllabus for a technical course, we're going to use a Cybersecurity Awareness course as an example. So if you are working in it, you worked in information security, you might be have been responsible for putting together a Cybersecurity Awareness Program for your company. And so you might have some experience putting together a course syllabus. 

So let's take what you already know, and maybe what you don't know. And let's talk about what it takes to put together a course syllabus for somewhat of a technical type of topic. So I'm going to share my screen with you here. And so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to think about the end in mind. So we're gonna have the end in mind. So what is it that we want our students, it might be employees, it might be whoever is purchasing your course. You know, what is it that we want them to do? 

So if we're going to create a Cybersecurity Awareness Program, we're just going to create one course for program in a in a Cybersecurity Awareness Program, you might have multiple courses. So but in this video, I'm just going to, we're just going to take one as an example. And we're going to create a course about fishing. 

Okay, so what we want to do is we want to think about what is the end in mind? What is it that we want our learners to either know, do or feel when they are finished with our course. Alright, so rather than give, you know, write a course about absolutely everything there ever could possibly need to know about fishing, it's really, you know, what is it that we want to learn to know how to do? So first of all, let's identify who our learners are to begin with. 

This is very important, because when you're talking about a topic like phishing, phishing is going to be very different for Cybersecurity Awareness training for you know, a receptionist somebody who works at accounting, you know, somebody like that, or somebody who is working in cybersecurity, and you're, they're trying, you're, you're showing them and you're, you're teaching them how to do investigative tasks that go with when when phishing emails come in, right? So it's, it's going to look very different. 

So you want to identify who your students are. So who are your students? So in this example, here, we're going to say it's employees of Acme Acme company, right? And we're going to say this is about a 500. person company, right? So those are my students. So I'm going to really just give them an overview of what is an awareness of phishing, right? So when they are finished with my course, what is it that I want them to? What is the transformation I want them to have had? So you can look at? What are they? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do? Or what do you want them to feel or some combination of those three.