Non-technical Majors Research Articles

Challenges and Opportunities of Cybersecurity Education for Non-technical Majors

Cybersecurity is fast becoming a crucial area of study due to the advancement of digital technology. As cybersecurity impacts all digital technology users, there is a pressing need for educating users on this issue. Moreover, the risk of falling victim to cyber threats is far more eminent in non-technical background users. Thus, this study focuses on the need for cybersecurity education towards non-technical majors in university, as an effort to address this problem. Through analysis of previous literatures, this paper highlights the possible challenges and opportunities in teaching cybersecurity for non-technical majors. This could provide valuable insights into the digital literacy gap for non-technical majors. The relevance of this study lies in its potential to enhance cybersecurity awareness and promote a safer digital environment.

ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ BBC MICRO:BIT ДЛЯ НАВЧАННЯ ПРОГРАМУВАННЮ

Considers the use of the BBC Microbit educational microcomputer to introduce the basics of programming to pupils and students in non-technical majors. The paper presents a comparison of the use of single-board computers. The available visual programming environment, as well as a large number of input and output devices on a single-board computer board, makes it much easier to interact with the environment. It is noted that the board can be programmed using visual block programming language, javascript or using Python. If you wish, you can load other systems into Micro:bit, for example, mbed OS and write in C++, but these are already opportunities for students of initial courses of technical specialties. It was determined that the board has an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, 256KB Flash ROM, 16KB RAM, 16MHz clock frequency. There is also BTLE support, a 2.4GHz peer-to-peer transmitter (101 channels), an accelerometer, a compass, a thermometer, and a line of GPIO pins. Even if there is no fee, there is a full-fledged simulator right in the browser, in which you can test all the functions of the program. Ready-made "blocks" are available to the student with many different functions: from simple input-output to sound reproduction or machine control. The board can be programmed using visual block programming language, javascript or Python. The Python programming language has a very simple, but simple editor, and the student can write the code independently. The work shows that the BBC Microbit microcomputer allows to simplify the process of learning program algorithms through the use of a visual programming environment. And the use of functional extensions with the use of third-party modules provides additional opportunities for creating powerful software applications.

Younger generations’ expectations regarding artificial intelligence in the job market: Mapping accounts about the future relationship of automation and work

There is a deficiency of in-depth explorations of young people’s visions of automation and work, and how these relate to popular projections found in the future-of-work debate. This article investigates such expectations, drawing on 62 interviews with Hungarian university students undertaking non-technical majors. Key characteristics of the interviewees’ accounts included their malleable and changing nature. Although respondents were aware of the widespread messages of experts about the revolutionary nature of likely changes, they expressed scepticism about the extent of change both regarding the macro level and in relation to their own lives. Interestingly, developments in artificial intelligence were not a factor in these young adults’ visions of their careers. The mechanisms and lines of reasoning underlying their expectations – such as a version of optimism bias – are discussed. The study highlights the importance of doing qualitative research on a topic which is dominated by quantitative research.

Digital mind maps in teaching materials science at the university level

Mind maps increase attractiveness of classes and motivation of students to create their own associations and stimulate them to expand the knowledge acquired during the course. The aim of the work was to review information technology (IT) tools for building digital mind maps in terms of their use for teaching materials at the university level and to examine students’ opinions on their use as a tool to support the acquisition of knowledge. The results of questionnaire surveys among university students from two different non-technical majors confirmed research hypotheses about the increase in student acceptance for introducing new educational techniques.

Collaborating With Writing Centers on Interdisciplinary Peer Tutor Training to Improve Writing Support for Engineering Students

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

Influences of Large State Research University on Student Religious Beliefs and Practices*

Our survey of 1,662 students of nearly equal gender and class standing revealed that our institution seems to affect both religious belief and practice in at least half of the students. The effects become evident after just 1 year and were generally sustained until graduation. Over all 4 years, 10 aspects of university culture enhanced religious beliefs in 33% of students, and 48% reported increased five religious practices. Smaller numbers reported diminished belief (18%) and practices (22%). Precollege religiosity was amplified. Believers strengthened their beliefs, and skeptics became more skeptical. The same was true for all practice factors, except discussion with peers, who had a huge influence, even on enhancing religious practices by atheists and agnostics. Finally, regardless of precollege religiousness, active believers and evangelicals were significantly more likely than atheists and agnostics to have enrolled in nontechnical academic majors.

Cyber Security for Everyone: An Introductory Course for Non-Technical Majors

Cyber Security for Everyone: An Introductory Course for Non-Technical Majors

Improved Appreciation of Mathematics Through an IBL Liberal Arts Mathematics Course

The author has taught an inquiry-based liberal arts mathematics class using the text “The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking” by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird a total of 20 times since Spring 2001. The students in this class have almost all been in non-technical majors and many started the semester with negative or ambivalent attitudes toward mathematics based on their prior experiences. The author has gathered responses from students in this class that illustrate significant changes in their attitudes towards mathematics during the course. In particular, the responses gathered at the end of the semester are often eloquent about understanding the great ideas of mathematics that students confronted in this course and about seeing many more and varied connections between mathematics and the “real world” than they had previously realized existed.

Teaching Web Information Retrieval and Network Communications Undergraduate Courses in IT Curriculum

INTRODUCTION With the pervasive use of social networks and search engines, the knowledge of computer networks and web information retrieval are becoming ever more important in an undergraduate IT (Computer Science, Information Systems, etc) curriculum. Over the last 20 years since the World Wide Web was invented, the landscape of undergraduate computer networks courses and web information retrieval courses has been going through tremendous changes. It has been 10 years since the first major computer networks curriculum workshop (Kurose et. al., 2002). It also has been three years since a major survey in the teaching of web information retrieval courses (Fernandez-Luna et al., 2009). First part of the paper surveys the undergraduate courses in two curriculum areas, computer networks and web information retrieval. The content of the survey includes the topics covered, the textbooks used, and major projects in these courses. The second part of the paper describes the authors' experiences in teaching such courses to undergraduate students in various discipline areas including computer science majors, IT majors, and non-technical majors. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The course survey part consists of three sections. Section II gives an overview and a brief history of computer networks as well web information retrieval courses in undergraduate curriculum. Next, the methods of our study are described in Section III. Section IV presents the findings of our study that includes the textbooks used, the topics covered, and the approaches to cover these topics, the lab exercises, and the programming projects. The second part of the paper discusses the authors' experiences in teaching the computer network courses and web information retrieval courses to different undergraduate audiences. One author's experiences about teaching of a special topic course Wireless Communications and Networks to non-major students is discussed. The second author's experiences in teaching web information retrieval courses to major students as a technical elective course and to first-year non-major students as a foundation seminar. Our combined thoughts about teaching computer networks course and web information retrieval courses to undergraduate students also are reported. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING OF COMPUTER NETWORKING COURSES AND WEB INFORMATION RETRIEVAL COURSES This section presents the results of a study of sample computer network courses and web information retrieval courses offered in the last a few years in undergraduate curriculum. For the computer networks courses, the authors collected the information on the web from six universities that are representatives from either major research universities where the computer networks courses are available to the undergraduate students, or predominately undergraduate universities that offer computer networks courses to their students as an elective course. For the web information retrieval courses, the authors collected 40 courses from the web in the U.S.A. and in China and present a summary in the paper. networking courses In 2002, SIGCOMM held the first ever workshop focused on the subject of computer networks education, entitled Computer Networking: Curriculum Designs and Educational Challenges. (Kurose et. al., 2002). Eighty nine participants took part in the three panels of discussions, undergraduate curricula, laboratory-based courses, and graduate curricula. The workshop reports summarizes in a table a list of topics that a computer networking course should cover, as a minimum. These topics include physical network basics such as digital channels, coding, CSMA, and wireless networks; packet, circuit switching and framing; inter-networking; protocols; client-server programming; security and elementary performance measurement. Ten years later, another SIGCOMM workshop on the same subject was held in August 2011 (ACM, 2011). …

Practicing “Safe” Technical Communication

The nuclear power industry is undergoing a renaissance, led by initiatives from the Obama administration and several states. In light of this development and the growing information economy, it is crucial that the public be well-informed, effective, and responsible regarding important technological issues. For this reason, undergraduate education, whether for technical or non-technical majors, must include an awareness of the complexity, ambiguity, and interestedness of the use of technical language and information. This is particularly important in communication involving public discourse and perceptions. I discuss here how I foster such awareness in my junior-level technical writing course for non-majors. We focus on the concept “safe” in relation to radiation and nuclear power. This is done in the overall context of making a recommendation for nuclear power as an energy source for the state of Florida for the next two decades, a realistic and urgent technical communication situation. Students see that standards and even the definitions of crucial terms shift depending on context and social circumstances, and that real-world choices involve trade-offs and balances between advantages and disadvantages.

COMPUTER SECURITY IN COMPUTER LITERACY EDUCATION

Computers are a pervasive part of society, even more so on college campuses. Among other skills, it is important that students have a base of understanding related to computer networking and security in order to protect themselves from online threats. Students who study for and pass tests that show their understanding of these topics appear to have a lower rate of computer security related issues. Since user education does appear to be an effective tool in affecting computer security practices, and security threats seem to be getting worse all the time, it is worth the effort to focus more energy on teaching network and security basics to all undergraduate students in both technical and non-technical majors as part of their degree programs. Given that security issues affect full time faculty and staff at the university, in addition to students, it is recommended that the computer security training developed for students be extended to all university employees.

Strategy-Based Instruction

Numerous studies have shown that many users do not acquire the knowledge necessary for the effective and efficient use of computer applications such as spreadsheets and Web-authoring tools. While many cognitive, cultural, and social reasons have been offered to explain this phenomenon, there have been few systematic attempts to address it. This article describes how we identified a framework to organize effective and efficient strategies to use computer applications and used an approach called strategy-based instruction to teach those strategies over five years to almost 400 students. Controlled experiments demonstrated that the instructional approach (1) enables students to learn strategies without harming command knowledge, (2) benefits students from technical and nontechnical majors, and (3) is robust across different instructional contexts and new applications. Real-world classroom experience of teaching strategy-based instruction over several instantiations has enabled the approach to be disseminated to other universities. The lessons learned throughout the process of design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination should allow teaching a large number of users in many organizations to rapidly acquire the strategic knowledge to make more effective and efficient use of computer applications.

Mom matters: Maternal influence on the choice of academic major

Using High School and Beyond data and multinomial logit modeling, this analysis explores the parental impact on a student's choice of academic major. Family measures that have traditionally been used in status attainment models have focused primarily on father. This analysis includes measures for both the mother and the father to gauge their individual impact. Results indicate that mothers influence students' choice of academic major most readily through emotional and normative channels. In addition, mothers generally encourage the pursuit of nontechnical majors, whereas fathers encourage the pursuit of technical majors. The implications of this analysis are that mothers ought to be included more systematicly in status attainment models.

Educating leaders in information assurance

Information assurance is a new and rapidly evolving field. The best way to prepare professionals for the information age in light of the increasing security threat is not clear. There is an attempt to educate future leaders in information assurance at the undergraduate level. At this level, the authors found two distinct types of students and determined that their needs could be met only with separate courses. A course was developed for nontechnical majors that focuses on strategy and policy, but with a strong technical component. The course for computer science majors is highly technical, but does not neglect the strategy, policy, ethics, and laws of information warfare. In both courses, the authors have relied heavily on active learning activities, reducing the content, and focusing on teaching the students how to teach themselves. Each course culminated in a major project that required the students to demonstrate mastery of the course objectives. The accomplishment of course goals was extremely successful. These courses can be models for information assurance education at other undergraduate institutions.

Treating Mathematics Anxiety: The Optional Contract

Much like a novice golfer on the first tee, the mathematics student can seriously hamper her or his performance by nervousness and insecurity toward mathematics. At the college level, this anxiety is most often seen in mathematics courses required for nontechnical majors. At my college, this uneasiness is particularly evident in Selected Topics in Mathematics, most commonly used to satisfy a graduation requirement, and Elementary Statistics, which is required for a number of majors. Approximately half my students enrolled in these courses are freshmen. The upperclassmen have delayed taking them because of anxiety toward, or dislike of, mathematics; many are on a second or subsequent attempt to pass the course.

?Minds and machines? for humanities majors: A liberal arts course in computers and cognition

A new one-semester course is described in which undergraduate students in non-technical majors are shown how traditional philosophical problems of knowledge, cognition, language, and human nature can be fruitfully investigated with computer-related concepts and techniques. A series of simple experiments is used to demonstrate to undergraduates that mental phenomena are real, that they can be studied experimentally, and that they can be modeled insightfully in computational — i.e., information-processing — terms. Each experiment illustrates a basic fact or principle of cognitive science: the formal character of algorithms; creativity and the variants of the Turing test; limitations on human memories; the use of cognitive strategies; heuristic techniques of artificial intelligence; formal grammars and their associated parsers; social, societal, and anthropological dimensions of mind; and degrees of logicality in human reasoning. Students are also taught the essentials of PROLOG, a programming language that is based explicitly on formal logic, incorporating such notions as fact, database, and query, thereby lending itself readily to the description of complex relational networks of a sort not commonly expected to be amenable to computer analysis.

Teaching 7000 Students Per Year

The undergraduate program at the University of Texas has grown into the largest astronomy teaching program in the world, with some 7000 students per year (almost 20,000 credit hours). The department has 22.5 Ph.D.-level teaching faculty, about 45 graduate students, and about 40 pre-professional undergraduate majors. But most of the enrollment is in courses that satisfy the science requirements of students in liberal arts and non-technical majors. In 1985–86, 96.4 per cent of our undergraduate credit hours taught were in such classes. It is instructive to examine the historical reasons for our growth and its educational consequences, and to draw some conclusions from both for other programs.

A Factor-Analytic Study of Mathematics Anxiety

Responses from 491 university students largely from non-technical majors were obtained for 21 personality scales, five scales reflecting attitudes toward mathematics and six personal characteristics. Factor analysis of the personality and mathematics attitude variables revealed that scores on four of the five mathematics attitude scales (one of which was entitled Math Anxiety) were strongly related to a single, underlying attitude toward mathematics. This underlying variable was in turn substantially related to mathematics level attained in high school, general academic achievement (GPA) and current mathematics grade. This global mathematics attitude factor was essentially unrelated to sex or any of the personality variables. Sex was, however, weakly related to the fifth mathematics attitude variable, which reflected the degree of desirability which subjects assigned to personal success in mathematics. Females tended to be more negative in this regard.

Qualitative and colorimetric analysis of salicylic acid

The experiment described here, combining the qualitative test with ferric chloride and the colorimetric analysis of salicylic acid in body fluids, was developed to meet the needs and interests of students with nontechnical majors.