Hire Harford First: Designing and evaluating the effectiveness of adapting courses in an Information Assurance and Cybersecurity degree program to a Competency-Based Mastery Learning curriculum

This Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project, entitled Hire Harford First, sought to “develop curriculum and educational materials that are based on ATE-funded CyberWatch Center's practices, and to disseminate curricula, course materials, and best practices to the ATE and broader educational community, including insights whether competency-based learning produces graduates who are better capable of making immediate positive contributions upon entering the workplace.” HHF was a three-year study in the design, development, and implementation of innovative curriculum designed to foster Competency-Based Mastery Learning (CBML). The results showed “the strong potential to…produce more graduates, since it will reduce attrition, encourage persistence, and attract more participants based on its reputation of success.” When fully-implemented, CBML instructional design and associated instructional methods that “flip the classroom” whereby faculty become success coaches rather than instructors for students produced proficiency improvement, on average, of 1.94 sigma. Additionally, this research revealed important constraints to fully achieving the benefits of CBML instructional designs.