Teaching Effective and Gamified Cybersecurity using the Metaverse: Challenges and Opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a tectonic shift in the way that institutions, ranging from k-12 to higher education, approach their teaching and learning strategies. It is an understatement to say that teaching effective and gamified Cybersecurity courses amidst the COVID19 pandemic placed an extreme pressure on faculty. While Zoom, WebEx, and Google Classroom virtual meeting were sufficient for some, others were in pursuit of platforms which could address the hands-on interaction component that happens in a class setting while isolating and/or removing some of the distractive and engagement-adverse ingredients that occur in traditional remote meeting platforms. To this end we present some challenges and opportunities which exist in the intersection of Cybersecurity learning and teaching through the Metaverse. As an extension we plan to measure the effectiveness of Metaverse towards Cybersecurity gamified remote learning by providing future research directions towards the ultimate goal of metamorphosing traditional Cybersecurity classrooms.