Digital Forensics Curriculum Development: Identification of Knowledge Domains Learning Objectives and Core Concepts

Digital forensics course offerings are being added to various curricula at colleges and universities world-wide at an amazing pace. This is due to significant student interest in the topic and job market demands for such skill sets. However, academia is struggling to establish a firm knowledge base and offer quality digital forensics education to its students. We contend that the identification and community acceptance of digital forensics knowledge domains, learning objectives, and core concepts is imperative to effectively and efficiently educating students in digital forensics. We argue that this goal has yet to be achieved. The purpose of this research and paper is to qualitatively test that presumption, and to methodologically identify and propose a set of digital forensics knowledge domains, supporting learning objectives, and necessary core concepts. Toward that end, we qualitatively analyzed digital forensics syllabi from 42 different colleges and universities and supplemented the analysis with our knowledge and experience. We conclude that our presumption is indeed correct, and thus propose a more structured approach toward digital forensics education and support it by presenting model course syllabi.