Thank you for the course and your feedback!
Feedback average (mean) was 4.1/5 good. Mode (most common) was 4.5/5, and median (middle) was 4/5.
I got feedback through many channels, which is nice: spoken, Peppi, comments on homepage. There is a lot of free form feedback on https://terokarvinen.com/trust-to-blockchain/#comments
Main area of improvement was to make homework less technically challenging and less worksome. This feedback was already applied during the course. And for the couple of advanced hackers, extra difficult voluntary technical tasks were provided. Other areas of improvement were more strict time limitations for student presentations, and adding student discussion in small groups (in addition to whole group discussions). I'm planning to try all of these in the new course Cybersecurity (ICB705AS3YE-3001, probably starts 2025-10-20).
Participants liked interactivity, listening to presentations, homework (with the caveats above), atmosphere, teacher's commentary and HelSec event.
I myself enjoyed our discussions and your insight.
We sometimes get quite profilic visitors in my security courses. I'll send a message to my mailing list for open visiting lectures: https://terokarvinen.com/newsletter/
I'm developing the new course, Cybersecurity. I hope to see you there in autumn 2025.
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Tero
It was my first time taking such a course, so everything was fairly new. I learned about threat models, which are crucial for identifying and prioritizing potential security risks.
This course also introduced me to blockchain technology and its practical applications, including an introduction to Bitcoin, the TOR network, and other important ICT security concepts.
I loved the idea of flipped learning. It pushed me out of my comfort zone. The homework was very detailed and easy to follow when doing assignments.
The course was challenging at first, given my lack of prior knowledge. However, it became easier as we progressed. The course structure was well-designed, allowing me to build my knowledge incrementally. I appreciate the fact that the extra effort put in after the submission of the assignment will not go unnoticed, I updated almost all my tasks.
Attending the Helsec event for the first time was an excellent opportunity to connect classroom learning with the real-world . The class presentations were a good approach and it made the class interesting. (Nb: Imagine hearing the same voice every week for two and half hours. I for one believe it's not exciting and one of the reasons for course drop outs.)
Overall, this course has significantly improved my understanding of cybersecurity basics and their real-world applications. I think I will take a similar course in the future. Thank you
I think there were many different areas covered, which I found interesting because it provided a broad overview of the topic. Hacking was definitely the most fun assignment.
The homework assignments were generally appropriately challenging, and I also noticed that their quantity was clearly reduced. Many of the tasks and topics were new to me, even Linux.
There could be a hard limit for presentations, as some of them were a bit too long. I would have preferred to hear more directly from the teacher or to work on tasks together rather than listening to presentations for the most part.
Additionally, using Teams or Zoom would be better, as the video chat we used didn’t work very well.
This was my 5th course taught by Tero (overall 25 course credits) (If you don't count my thesis advisory, which was also done by Tero) and as with the previous courses, I liked this one.
I found this course to in a nice balance. It had theory, some hands-on practice and many presentations by the students. In my bachelors studies in Haaga-Helia I completed all of the information security courses, including the penetration testing course that was held for the first time, so the course subjects were already quite familiar to me, but I still found this course useful, since the subjects selected were good and current, and it's never a bad idea to refresh you're knowledge on a subject.
Considering that this is a masters level course, understandably it was more focus on management but in all honesty, that didn't bother me.
Is this course useful? Of course, since ICT security is becoming increasingly important.
It seems that Tero is quite famous for the homework he gives out and this course did not disappoint. Homework load was on the heavy side, but I think this is subjective and if I reflect on it the assignments were good and to the point. I you want to learn and get a good grade, you have to put in the work.
I liked that there were presentations throughout the course by the students, it mixed in quite well with the course schedule. In my opinion the subjects were chosen accordingly to the presenters skill set and all in all they were interesting.
What to improve? Well, I don't like remote lectures, and if lecture must be held remotely, everyone should have their cameras turned on but in all honestly, the atmosphere in the classes was good.
As with the past courses, I would highly recommend this course!
5/5
The course was good. I learned a small piece of many things. So in future I am able to learn more if there is a need. In that way the course was usefull.
I did many things for the first time.
Presentations were interesting, all of them. Presenting and commenting is not my thing, I prefer to listen to the others.
Homework were the most usefull for learning perspective. And it was good that all tasks weren't mandatory. In that way we were able to decide how much time we use for this course.
To improve course, keep the voluntary task in future also.
I could recommend the course for a fellow student as some kind of starting point for the topic.
Most of the course subject was previously familiar to me, although it was nice to get a refresher and some hands-on exercises to do (hadn't really installed Tor yet, though had read about it). The reading material was good and the exercises were not too time-consuming. One suggestion is that maybe if the presentation subject aligns with the course material (someone is presenting about Bitcoin or crypto as an example), it should be set for a later lecture after the basics have been gone through if possible, now people without prior experience probably lost some of the value since it's hard to discuss Bitcoin without including any of the crypto stuff.
The last assignment to look for a scientific review article was annoying, since I don't really have a specific ITsec subject I am interested in (more of a generalist), so it took almost as long to find a review article as it took to read and summarize it (maybe add some example subjects/subfields to look for if one is deficient of imagination). The course atmosphere was good, but maybe it would be good to go through how the assignments should be done in a little bit more detail in the first lecture (having to include screenshots, deadlines being 24h in advance, does the deadline apply to commenting others' work, adding your own commentary in addition to summarizing, and having the h8 possibility explained right away would be nice). Additionally, grouping the assignments so that the mandatory ones are clearly listed would be good, in h3 the John part was hidden so well that I initially missed it, and so did one of the other participant's assignment I reviewed. Reviewing others' assignments is also a nice extra, it gives you other perspectives on the assignments and allows you to improve if necessary.
The presentations were generally of interesting subjects and provoked nice discussion. I also appreciated the teacher's commentary on some of the contemporary happenings.
Overall the course was very nice.
This course was combination of many new things, some more challenging (I still don't really undersatnd how encryption works even though I read the fundamentals) and some more familiar to me (company level cyber security). Installation of Ubuntu and using darkweb were totally new things and I had never heard of Jitsi before this course. Almost all platforms used in this course were not familiar to me.
I liked idividual presentations and Helsec event quite a lot. It was nice to hear expereinces from peers and also from people who have wide knowledge of different cyber security things.
For my personal presentation, I was pretty disappointed with technological issues. I like presenting and actually have a hobby of public speaking (around 60 lectures or panel discussions under my belt currently) so my presentation could have been good experience but my own mistakes affected my performance and I could not perform best. But I hope that my fellow classmates were insipired by my presentation and were able to select their topics based on that second lecture.
I feel that many things were beneficial for my work-life. Password related homework for example gave me a lot of new information and now I better understand whys and hows of our company's cyber security. Same goes with legistalation and understanding standarsization because I just like to have things in order.
What I could have liked more is group discussions. We only had one of them and I personally learn best when having discussions and making realizations during these discussions. I have hard time with opening my mouth during lectures in the beginning so active participation in the start of lecture is always quite difficult and working in smaller groups helps to get to know with your peers.
As for homework, the first 4 homeworks were super challenging and I am grateful that you listened to our feedback and made the amount of work less technical and more of something that could teach new and be interesting to those who don't have all the expertise.
I would recommend this course (in this format) to a highly technical person or even a more technical person than I am. While I do have tech experience, the learning curve in the beginning of the course was bit too high after normal work day in busy office and I would probably not take this course again as it was honestly sometimes too much for me. But when I start something, my toxic trait is to stick to it so I had to get trhough the course. I don't feel like I could have met my personal target grades so at this point I'm just pretty much happy if I can pass the course
In the future I know that the course will be restructured so I hope that it will be accessible to those like me, who are slightly technical but not as invested in cyber security as some of the people in the course were. I hope that new student will have more group discussions, perhaps bit more structures weekly lecture topics and it would be intersting to see if lecture topics could match with presentation topics to boost up learning.
Thank you for your patience with us (me) and have a great festive season. Don't hack too many Santa Clauses.
I learned a lot. Almost all of the stuff was new and exciting. Basically everything I did was first timing. Had no hands-on experience on the tasks, and they were pretty difficult, but just the right amount of challenge for them to be engaging. The skills I learned aren't useful everyday, but they have increased my alertness on security issues.
The presentations were good, and the discussions were insightful. I would've liked a bit more time to be had for the theory parts, but the homeworks were very thorough and they teached a lot.
I enjoyed the course and the atmosphere was good. It was the toughest course I have had but also I think the most rewarding :)
Would recommend 10/10
The amount of homework was a bit much at one point, but it was something we discussed as a group right at the next meet. After which, the amount was tuned down and it was perfect after that. Have to say it was quite empowering to have time to get some of the voluntary homework done after finishing the normal ones.
The course was eye-opening and well strucktured. We covered a lot and I especially liked the commenting part on others homework. As there were quite a few times you learned a lot from reading others homework too.
Most of the feedback I got were short, and likewise most of the feedback I gave back was short. There were couple times with longer feedback both ways, which is kind of a shame, but I do understand that there is limited time to read throught others homework too.
In future I think having the minimum of 2 works checked and volantarely doing extra 2 as a guide would be nice. More feedback, more insights.
I learned a lot during the course. In each week's homework there were something I hadn't known before, e.g. installing virtual machine and playing around in there.
Something I would do differently is I would leave out the students' presentations. Lectures from the teacher were very short and not so organized as there were always only little bit time left.
I think I learned the most from homework which I really enjoyed doing, I liked the balance of reading/summarising and hands-on work.
Thank you for the course!
I took the course because while working in industry for 20 twenty years i've seen the rise of security and complexicity of it. And it has been my blindspot. Course fullfilled my expectations and the approach was most of the time funny and encouraging. All the homeworks had something new for me and those were not too easy to accomplish. Actualy some of those got me so addicted that time flew while I was doing those. Hashes,public keys, bitcoin were good hands-on exercises. I missed on-time feedback for homework, so you could get the feeling how you're doing and also learn from others. Presentations were nice to give and listen, these should definitelu be part of the new course. Your teaching style is unique but sometimes you could try to dampen your manners. You don't leave anyone cold. Thank you Tero.
— Perttu, 2024-12-12-I learned a lot about cyber security, for example about best practises to stay secured using a computer. And also I learned how blockchain and hashes work.
-I used password cracking tools and visited the TOR network for the firts time in this course.
-Yes I think the skills learned in the course are useful.
-I liked all of the presentations and they were really interesting. It was a great idea to have multiple presentations during the lessons. I was nervous about making my presentation, but managed to do it and got good feedback and support for my presentation.
-I like the homeworks and they were fun to do and I learned a lot of new skills by doing hands on tasks rather than just reading about the subject. Some of the homeworks like the H4 had too much things to read and summarize.
-I really liked the course and it this was my favorite Masters level Haaga-Helia course I attended, because of the hands on tasks and I actually had a lot of fun during the course.
-I would improve the course by having more hands on tasks and it would be great if theteacher would show how to solve some of the orevious weeks assigments if some people found them difficult.
-I would recommend this course for everyone who is interested of cyber security and computer science in general.
I got a lot of new information on this course, Linux environment and using terminal and sudo powers was new but really fun and interesting. Really enjoyed the exercises even though some of them were quite tricky. This course gave a better understanding on the security basics.
The atmosphere was really nice and energetic! Enjoyed the presentation and it was interesting to get different views on things. From my perspective I would have liked to have more hands on exercises. Really liked the flow of the course, how it went forward. Of course for business person sometimes the terms and lingo were something that needed googling a bit.
Definitely learnt alot on the course, MITRE ATTACK framwork, Darket diaries, Helsec, Kill chain model, APT. The time was short to go really deep in most of these areas but definetly knowledgeable going forward.
Did you do something for the first time? (Used some technique or a tool for the first time?)
First running a Debian VM, installing and using tools. First time learning about tor networks and browser.
This is really useful, one must familiarize himself or herself in the cyber threats out there and how to defend and mitigate them.
The presentations were quite insightful. Probably found it a challenge to prepare for it fully well.
I enjoyed the class and would gladly recommended it.
I think an improvement would be to break up the students in different groups for discussions in a selected topic and then have a single student summarize their discussions to the rest of the class.
The class for me was a 4.5/5. Thank you Tero.
There was lot of new stuff and it was nice to hear all the presentations around subject. Technical stuff were hard to me but it was good that there were different kind of tasks.
What I didn't like was that nothing on this course happens on actual Haaga-Helia websites and tools. Also introduction to homework was always quite fast.
I was superhappy when Tero asked about our opinion of homeworks and those were little less time consuming after that.
There was a good atmospheare during classes. I don't know what I actually expected from the course but I'm happy that I decently managed tasks and understood subjects handled. At least I know much more about security basics now.
The course was demanding but also informative, if one development suggestion had to be given, it would be giving more consideration to the different levels of knowledge that the students possess, experts getting bored and begginers struggling. Thank you for the course. I had fun struggling.
— Jori Laine, 2024-12-12