Network Analytics for Improving Students’ Cybersecurity Awareness in Online Learning Systems

Many universities have been widely delivering online courses via online learning systems that rely on the Internet in their execution. However, such systems often focus on the delivery of online courses while overlooking cybersecurity issues. To ensure the cybersecurity of the online learning environment, students and end-users must have appropriate knowledge and be aware of cybersecurity issues. This research identifies the key knowledge areas that belong to the students' cybersecurity awareness, namely internal threats, false identity authentication, and personal data leakage. It then proposes the network analytics approach to disseminate cybersecurity knowledge, by identifying the influential students from their social networks of online interactions in the online learning systems. A work-in-progress network analytics dashboard is presented, and future research actions are discussed in this paper.