V-ALERT

This project is aimed at schoolchildren and their teachers, who should adopt the knowledge about Internet safety, and sensitive information sharing on the Web. This will help bridge the gap between understanding and implementing the solutions, and it is focused on ICT students and ICT experts.[:]

Project description:

The rationale of V-ALERT project is to first aid towards the development of information security awareness culture (focusing mainly to children in schools and teachers) and then bridge the gap between awareness and coping (focusing on students in the field of ICT, ICT practitioners). Moreover, V-ALERT aims at providing enterprises employees and ICT users with an immersive, cost-effective and innovative virtual learning environment that will fully support life-long learning in Information Security principles. It is the consortium’s strong belief that such a learning environment for information security awareness could inspire and encourage everyone to practice secure computing, because everyone – from enterprise managers to everyday ICT users – will understand that they have a vested interest in secure computing.

The vision of V-ALERT is to use a uniform environment that will simulate real-life security threat scenarios, examples and counterexamples in a way that different groups of users will experience the risks and combine critical skills, knowledge and collaboration to overcome them, without exposing their organization to real risk. The end-users will be immersed in a virtual environment that will simulate real-life working or educational environments. These environments will also be enriched with relevant multimedia educational material for further comprehension of the subject. The underlying pedagogy in this approach is “learning by doing” which can enhance experiential learning, increase intrinsic motivation of learners and lead to deeper understanding and learning. Furthermore, the virtual world learning environment that will be developed in this project is going to be an on-line 24/7 educational tool which can support distant learners of different ages and provide Information Security Awareness in a way that is technological simple, pleasant, safe and cost effective.

The virtual environment will provide the scenarios in a core language, but it will be easily expandable in any new language. Within the scope of the project, the in-world learning material and scenarios will be available in English (as a core language) as well as in all partner languages (Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian).

Hellenic Open University, as the coordinator of this project, has worked towards the formation of a partner consortium which would bring together experts in the area of information security awareness, high skilled developers and end-users from all areas of relative education (children, teachers, ICT students and professionals). All the selected partners have significant experience in the assigned tasks and they have gained extensive know-how through their involvement in considerable European projects and international cooperation.