After a few years of acquiring technology through donations and grants for the program in computer and security and information assurance, three new programs, are being offered according to the director of the Norwich University advanced computing center.
“(This) program … is one of the first of its kind in the United States,” said Peter Stephenson, director of Norwich’s advanced computing center.
“We are trying to keep up with what industry and government are asking for our curriculum,” said Danielle Zeedick, program director for the bachelor of science in computer security and information assurance.
“Our degree takes a holistic approach to the idea of info assurance and the concept of cyber warfare and cyber security (programs offered at Norwich),” Zeedick said. “That is why we changed our curriculum. It is dynamic just like the industry is.”
“Norwich is a center of academic excellence and information assurance education and that designation is given to us by the national security agency and department of homeland security,” Stephenson said.
A center of academic excellence, according to www.nsa.gov, is a program whose goal is to “reduce vulnerability in our national information infrastructure by promoting higher education and research in information assurance (IA) and produce a growing number of professionals with IA expertise in various disciplines.”
“Four-year colleges and graduate-level universities are eligible to apply to be designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in IA Education. Each applicant must pass a rigorous review, demonstrating its commitment to academic excellence in IA education. During the application process, applicants are evaluated against stringent criteria,,” according to www.nsa.gov.
According to Stephenson, Norwich was one of the first centers of academic excellence.
“There are now over 100 centers of academic excellence in the United States. So you can imagine it is very competitive,” said Stephenson. “It is not good enough anymore just to be a center of excellence, we had to update the program to have more technical aspects of it along with the management aspects.”
To keep up with changing technology, the programs were changed entirely this summer, Zeedick said.
“Our curriculum is really dynamic and we have a lot of industry partners that we work with to make sure that our curriculum is up to speed,” said Zeedick “We really do have a dream team facility, between all four of us we have about 100 years of experience.”
“We have a need to advance the program and the technology, we have a need to be more competitive and we have the technical capability now to realize that,” Stephenson said.
Three concentrations were created to give students more choices and to put the information assurance program in a more competitive position. The new concentrations are advanced information security, digital forensics and information warfare.
“So what this meant to us competitively is I don’t think there are more than two or three universities in the country outside of the national service academy that have a concentration in information warfare,” Stephenson said.
“It’s (information warfare) put together for us by a guy named Leigh Armistead, who works only on the courses that he’s involved in,” Stephenson said. “His courses are online, although he comes up here and lectures twice per semester.”
“I mean our entire degree is about computer security, information security, protecting our critical info structure called CIP (critical info structure protection),” Zeedick said.
Zeedick also said, “With an advanced information security concentration in addition to our regular curriculum, we concentrate on security network, network attack and defend, and computer architecture and operating systems (how computer systems are build and arranged).”
Old courses involving information security and advanced information security have been moved into their own concentrations and been improved to keep up with the evolving changes, Stephenson said.
“Most universities that have a forensics program will teach computer forensics and maybe network forensics,” Stephenson said. “We have what we call digital forensics that is pretty much an overview of digital forensics science.”
“We have Malware forensics (dealing with viruses) and we have the digital investigation program, so we do have at least two courses that almost no other universities have and three that most of them don’t have,” Stephenson said.
“Three years ago we had about 15 incoming freshman in our program …,” Stephenson said. “Last year we had 30 and we announced that the new program was going to kick off this year, and this year we had 60, so we have doubled every year for the past three years.”
“I’m going to expand this probably, I’ve got to convince people to let me expand it of course but we’ve had pretty good success so far with what we are doing,” Stephenson said.