  Cybersecurity educators have widely introduced hackathons to facilitate
practical knowledge gaining in cybersecurity education. Introducing such events
into cybersecurity courses can provide valuable learning experiences for
students. The nature of the hackathon format encourages a learning-by-doing
approach, and the hackathon outcomes can serve as evidence for students
knowledge, capability and learning gains. Prior work on hackathons in education
mainly focused on collocated hackathon events in the traditional classroom
setting. These hackathon events often took place as a one-off event at the end
of the course. However, one-off hackathon events at the end of a course might
not be sufficient to improve learning. Instead, we focus on analyzing the
integration of a series of online hackathon events into an online cybersecurity
course and explore how this integration can address online education issues by
encouraging collaboration and developing a practical understanding of the
delivered course by solving real-world challenges. We evaluate interventions to
foster learning and analyze its effect on collaboration and learning gains for
students in the course. Our findings indicate that students attribute learning
benefits to the introduced interventions that supported teamwork and
collaboration, maintained student participation and interest in the course, and
encouraged learning-by-doing.
