Teaching information security with virtual laboratories

With rapid advances in the online education and computer virtualization technology, laboratories leveraging virtual machines, or Virtual Hands-on Laboratories, have become one of the key education resources in many fields. In the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, we have developed a set of virtual hands-on laboratories and used them in many technology courses. These virtual labs are collaboratively developed by instructors, instructional technologists, system administrators, student learning assistants, and interns. They have become an integrated component of many courses taught in our college to enhance hands-on learning experience in the information sciences. In this article, we introduce our teaching experience on using virtual hands-on laboratories in an introductory information security course as part of the curriculum of the Security and Risk Analysis major. Our teaching experiences show that the hands-on virtual labs are quite effective in learning, especially on connecting theory to practice. We expect they will continue to play a critical role in our curriculum as online education becomes indispensable.