Security Education 101

Figure out if you’re positioned to lead a training in the community you’d like to help. Evaluate your preparedness: set you and your learners up for success in your training event, and inspire them to continue learning about digital security.

Navigate the complex process of teaching your learners how to avoid risky security practices, while providing a safe learning environment. Harm reduction strategies ensure you are able to help them explore their options and improve their habits.

Examine your relationship to the people you’ll be teaching to ensure clear communication, accurate understandings of their points of view, and a flexible approach to different experience levels. Knowing the diverse needs of your audience sets you up for a successful event and empowers learners to make good choices.

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take a companion: discover how teaching as a team is a useful way to round out expertise and complement teaching styles and learning preferences. Explore the ways collaborative trainings can give learners more individualized instruction and helps build a sense of community.

It’s tempting to teach digital security as though it were a classroom lecture. Read about adult learning principles and level up your teaching practice.

Prepare lessons that can be adapted to meet the different threat models and security concerns of your audience. Broaden the accessibility of security education with inclusive strategies that welcome a wide set of life experiences, cultural differences, and perspectives.

Familiarize yourself with the various personal, cultural, and social factors that influence the ways your students learn. Learn how to foster an environment where every participant is able to practice their security and privacy skills in the way that works best for them.

How to provide the best learning experience possible for students who may have invisible needs and disabilities. Build your knowledge of accessible resources, activities, and accommodations for a variety of learning needs and disabilities.

Find out when to say “I don’t know” in order to reduce harm, limit misinformation, and help learners develop their intuitions. Discover where the boundaries of your expertise lie and when to steer learners towards other resources.

Not sure what to do with a roomful of diverse risks and concerns? Set expectations, find common denominators, stay focused on the group, and team up with a friend.

People learn at different paces. Explore how to help each person advance in how they approach digital security.

Explore how to identify your prospective learners and establish a working relationship with stakeholders. Grow your potential audience through conscientious planning and leveraging of community support.

Learn how to define specific and attainable objectives to help focus your trainings. Explore how to evaluate objectives that will provide students with clear goals of what they will accomplish during a training and how it will be applicable in their daily lives.

Discover the various ways of creating a safe, welcoming space in your trainings through introductory activities that allow participants to relax and build community. Determine the best options for your particular audience and their threat models, cultural differences, and comfort level.

Establish and set clear expectations for the content and format of your training to set you and your learners up for success. Define a set of objectives to meet during your training, create a lesson plan to meet those goals, and test your strategies to prepare for potential challenges.

Prepare yourself as a first time trainer and arm yourself with useful tools, awesome collaborators, and rigorous lesson plans. Get an overview of the different methods for prepping a fun and educational first training.

Learn to be open-minded about the devices and operating systems your learners use. Expand your framework to include users with different preferences, needs, and restrictions when it comes to the technology they use and the advice you give to learners.

Are you a naturally shy or an innately outgoing techie teaching digital security? We have some tips for being mindful of your natural social inclinations.

Hands off! Give people room to learn and help participants feel more comfortable with their own devices.

Explore how to be mindful of your audience’s emotional states, and help them to feel engaged to learn.

Explore how insecurity demonstrations can be used to destroy trust between learners and trainers, and can even harm the training by making learners unable or unwilling to engage with the material. Learn to instill harm-reduction and trust-building security demonstrations into your training for the best learning outcomes.

Not sure what to say when someone doesn’t see the value in learning about digital security? Try out some of these ideas.

Investigate how to reduce harm to participants when recommending tools. Practice how to help your learners make informed decisions on what tools best match their personal circumstances while providing a supportive learning environment to explore their options.

Sometimes, there isn’t enough time to give nuanced advice. For those times, you may want a short pitch on security.

“Keep your software updated!” is the closest thing we have to security advice that will work for everyone. But the reasoning behind it can be counterintuitive, and even quick updates can intolerably interrupt people’s workflows. Below are several common questions about why it is so important to update one’s software, as well as tips for how to talk about it with people new to digital security.

No software is...

Develop your understanding of how encryption keeps your and your learners’ messages unreadable and protected. Learn to differentiate between the different types of encryption and how they protect users’ information.

Review how web browsing security works and the various ways you and your students can protect your browsing information from being viewed. Improve your existing browsing security habits with a suite of tools that provide protection in different circumstances.

We asked trainers what concepts were “aha moments for them. Here’s one such concept.

"The cloud is just someone else’s computer."