  As cyber threats endanger everyone, from regular users to computing
professionals, spreading cybersecurity awareness becomes increasingly critical.
Therefore, our university designed an innovative cybersecurity awareness course
that is freely available online for students, employees, and the general
public. The course offers simple, actionable steps that anyone can use to
implement defensive countermeasures. Compared to other resources, the course
not only suggests learners what to do, but explains why and how to do it. To
measure the course impact, we administered it to 138 computer science
undergraduates within a compulsory information security and cryptography
course. They completed the course as a part of their homework and filled out a
questionnaire after each lesson. Analysis of the questionnaire responses
revealed that the students valued the course highly. They reported new
learning, perspective changes, and transfer to practice. Moreover, they
suggested suitable improvements to the course. Based on the results, we have
distilled specific insights to help security educators design similar courses.
Lessons learned from this study are relevant for cybersecurity instructors,
course designers, and educational managers.
