Rick Butler said:

Well, it looks like this has been very well covered. For my contribution to this discussion, I'm going to focus on lecture didactic. Hands on is ALWAYS going to be better for learning, but it's nigh impossible to avoid lecture.

One of my favorite things to do when teaching any class, not just Sec+, is something that @BrianFord alluded to - where have I seen this before. For me, what I like to do is randomly toss a question from "the last module", as I move through a day's worth of material. So, for example, let's say I spent an hour or so talking about basic cryptography and now I'm, say, going into PKI. About midway into the PKI conversation, I'll toss out a question from basic crypto - just to see if they are short-term retaining things.

The human brain requires about seven exposures to the same information, and in different methods, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, in order to process it into long term storage. Further, it has to connect to something that the student already knows, which creates that neurological connection.

I've also been known, in classroom situations, to toss candy for correct answers. It's amazing how much an incentive a tiny treat like that can have.

At the end of the day (although hardly the end of the conversation), it's all about engaging the student in a two-way fashion, not just the ol' sage-on-the-stage, when lecturing. Feedback and questioning, engaging the learners directly will do a lot to engage them.

/r

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Michael Schmitz said:

There is no CompTIA Book yet available for Linux+ V8. The TTT is not run yet. but then you will get Access to the E-Book.
Hope that helps..

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jarrelrivera said:

As with any other courses, don't kill the students with powerpoint slides.

Security+ has lots of interesting topics, and the world has lots of news related to cybersecurity. Merge the two - theory and practical. In that way, the students will get to see the value of what is being discussed - and they get to remember the details more, in my experience.

You also don't need to do the talking for the entire time. There are good PBQs and quizzes in the CompTIA material. Let the students talk between themselves either in pair or in groups - depending on the amount of training time, that is.

The labs are good, only if the instructions are clear enough for the students to follow. So, I do recommend you running the labs yourself, then find the possible pain points for the students, so that in class, you can give an intro spiel about the lab, how it connects to the lesson, and what the students may learn or need to know in doing the lab, i.e. how to use Wazuh for the first time, or how to learn the various options for nmap.

There are heaps of tools and websites for Security+. Too many to identify. I suggest that you create threads for each question or topic that you'd need help with.

In any case, I hope this helps

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Mark Anthony Germanos said:

Hi M. Shehata.

Kudos on choosing the best possible forum for that question. Hope to see you here often. I started training Security+ in June, 2023 and have polished my presentations to keep students engaged. Here are some items that may work for you.

1. Home network scan. When you get to the NMAP section, scan your network, share the results, then have students scan theirs. This could be in class or as homework. Have them record the results and then share them with the class. I am attaching a .PDF of an NMAP scan result that I copied and pasted into MS Word and then made beautiful. I usually introduce this task with "This is a fair and objective request you may see when interviewing for a job. Might as well practice here..." The CIN forum did not let me attach a .DOC :-(
2. Memory leaks. Show that many programs, including web browsers, open multiple processes. The challenge is to make sure all processes clear out of RAM when the user closes the hosting program. I open Task Manager then a) launch Firefox, b) visit https://online-stopwatch.com and c) exit Firefox. Students see how many processes Firefox opens and then see them clear out of memory within 75 seconds. Explain that if any Firefox processes remained up and running, that would be a sign of a memory leak.
3. Take them into AI. They've already chosen a favorite AI LLM. I take them in Perplexity then follow a progression of initial prompt and then a series of follow-ups. An example that is highly appropriate here is a) Tell me about the CIA, b) tell me about the CIA in cybersecurity, c) tell me about the CIA in cybersecurity at a 6th grade reading level... You can experiment with more specific prompts. Everybody pays attention.

Onward and upward.

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BrianFord said:

Welcome M.Shehata!

I'm a big fan of active learning and always try to use different techniques to make sure my learners are and stay engaged. I try to mix up my methods offering some from within a lesson and others at end of a lesson. For the Security+ course a couple of ideas might be:

• Ask students to connect topics back to the CIA triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability),
• Ask the students to connect methods back to the Security Controls (categories and functional controls), and
• Something I call 'Where have we seen this before?' where learners connect topics (important to mastering compare and contrast questions).

I do demos using basic OS installed tools (Windows Event Viewer) and web browsers (examine the CompTIA.org site certificate in Chrome). I take students to the NVD to investigate CVEs and to the FIRST.org site to see a CVSS calculator.

I caution about using too many tools or visiting too many websites. Adult learners can only recall for or five things in a day. If you try to do too much in one day they may not be able to recall the topic the next day (but they may remember the site or the tool).

As far as learners hands on activities in Security+ I stay with the PBQs and Labs in CertMaster. I may walk through the Exploring the Lab exercise with a class but if it's not a bootcamp and time allows I try to organize small teams to complete a lab and then present it to the class. I use teams because if one person is leading a demo and goes blank or has a tech issue it becomes awkward and stops the learning for all. In bootcamp courses the students should do the labs on their own time. I try to fit in a walk through of the Vulnerability Assessment and Packet Capture labs.

I hope this helps.

Brian
.

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Lshanno said:

It's a 5 day pacing for both courses combined.

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Lshanno said:

It's a 5 day pacing for both courses combined.

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David Staples said:

Hey everyone, happy Tuesday! So I was teaching a DataSys+ class last week and there are some security topics in the course. This being a military group, I knew that they had most likely done a Security+ at some point and mentioned that they should have seen some of these topics on their Security+ exam. One of the students relayed to me that he thought the exam was so much easier now than it was years ago when he first took it. I asked when he took it and he said just a few months ago. I asked more about his experience on the exam and he said that these days all you have to do is memorize the questions in the test bank because they're practically the same questions as on the exam. I asked more about the test bank he (and another student who was in his same Sec+ class) used and he went on to describe the VCE Player that is commonly used with braindumps. He also said that when he had a difficult question on the exam, he simply raised his hand and the instructor would sit there and go through the question with him. The instructor was not only proctoring the exam, but also helping students out during the exam.

After the class was over, I talked to the owner of another training company that I knew does business with this group and he said he had already reported it to CompTIA, but CompTIA seems to be saying they can't do anything without any sort of hard evidence and apparently isn't going to do anything about it. So my question is, should I even bother reporting this to CompTIA if they're not going to do anything anyways? All I have is what students told me about their experience. No physical, hard, concrete evidence. Does CompTIA actually care about cheating, or so long as a training company brings them a lot of business they don't really care about how they get the students to pass the exam? What would you do?

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Nathan Miller Masiku said:

Core 1 for one week, and Core 2 is supposed to be for one week as well.

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Rick Butler said:

So, I don't think you can push both Core 1 and Core 2 into one week and have an effective class. In all the time I've taught A+ (disclosure, I have not taught v12), I have never seen both sides taught properly in a week, even in a bootcamp scenario. Perhaps the only way I would suggest it would be for established professionals that are merely reviewing content. Even then, that's an overly ambitious pace.

Mathematically, 90 hours divided by 5 is going to be 18 hours per day if we're understanding it correctly. Perhaps the schedule is a 5d/wk schedule across two weeks, making it 9h/day, which may be more reasonable?

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sbeth said:

If you're looking to stay with certification prep, you might want to check out Ascend Education: https://ascendeducation.com/landing-page/ I previewed a few of their courses and found them to be easy to navigate. Their course prospectuses are more informative and better organized than TestOut’s. I went in a different direction with my courses, but if I ever went back to offering a cert prep course, they'd be a strong contender.

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