At the NDSU Computer Science Department and Institute for Cyber Security Education and Research, we’re inspired by Gov. Burgum’s charge to engage in the “relentless pursuit of excellence”. Like Burgum, we agree that the nature of education and higher education, in particular, is changing. With our land grant-inspired mission at the cyber security institute, this challenges us in two complementary ways. First, we seek to use digital technologies to deliver learning to students – be they 18 to 22 year olds on campus, mid-career professionals throughout the state or soldiers half-way around the world – in the way that is most useful to them. Second, we recognize the tremendous need to keep digital classrooms and students’ information secure. This is particularly true for the young adults who, concurrent with entering college, are beginning to take control of their personal, financial and – now – digital identifies fully for the first time.

Our “relentless pursuit of excellence” in these areas has taken several forms. We have launched a graduate certificate program, available entirely online (with the option for students to take some course on campus, if desired), in cyber security in conjunction with the University of North Dakota and Minot State University. One of us (Straub) will be teaching the first course of this program online this fall, covering cyber security for cyber-physical systems (such as robots and UAVs). In addition to the course content, a lot of attention has been paid to the delivery of this course and creating a framework to enable other courses to be developed specifically for online-only or hybrid environments that take advantage of the digital medium. An undergraduate version of this course, using the same delivery mechanism, will also be available as part of a cyber security recognition for Computer Science B.S. students.

We have also begun to engage in outreach activities, in service of the ‘land grant’ mission. The other of us (Nygard), along with a colleague, Pratap Kotala, from the Computer Science Department, recently presented to a girls’ technology camp and has made several similar presentations in the past. Straub will be leading a seminar for incoming students on protecting their personal information online and off, with a particular focus on the on-campus and online campus environments. We are working on reaching out to the broader North Dakota community in numerous other ways, including making presentations on personal information security and engaging with those in need of our cyber security knowledge and expertise.

In education and in cyber security, this is not a time to sit idly by. We hope that our “relentless pursuit of excellence” in these areas will be of significant benefit to the state and nation, particularly as we begin to pursue bigger and bolder objectives of national significance.

Kendall E. Nygard is the Chair and a Professor and Jeremy Straub is an Assistant Professor in the NDSU Computer Science Department. Nygard is the Director and Straub the Associate Director of the NDSU Institute for Cyber Security Education and Research. Nygard also advises the U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Fellow.