An Educators Perspective of Integrating Information Security into Undergraduate Computing Curricula

Information is an integral part of our everyday lives and organisations need to have their information and related systems protected from various threats that exist. Therefore, information security education is of vital importance to all computing learners. It is the duty of higher education institutions to ensure that information security is pervasively integrated into the undergraduate computing curriculum. This will ensure that security is addressed multiple times, in multiple classes. Furthermore, this could ensure that higher education institutions produce computing graduates that possess fundamental information security knowledge, skills and understanding. This, in turn, will provide computing graduates with the ability to combat information security related threats. This paper briefly reviews existing literature relating to information security in higher education. Furthermore, it explores various South African educators’ perspectives on the pervasive integration of information security into undergraduate computing curricula. This was determined through a semi-structured interview supported by a questionnaire. Furthermore, the participants of this research study were educators in the Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology fields. The results indicate that there are various challenges in South Africa regarding the pervasive integration of information security into undergraduate computing curricula.