Remote education and student online safety

Abstract

Objectives The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the higher education sector. The transfer of didactic activity to the Internet has significantly increased the probability of successful cyber attacks on a group of Internet users such as students. The main goal of the article was to determine the relationship between remote teaching and the safety of students on the Internet. Material and methods The survey was conducted among deliberately selected groups of students from 3 high schools in Poland. Results 622 students from three Polish universities participated in the study. It was found that: (1) during remote teaching, students' main activities were browsing content posted by lecturers and participating in teaching activities. (2) Students primarily communicated via Facebook (93.09%), (3) The most common cyber threats encountered by students were spam, online auction scams and communication fraud. (4) Students' cybersecurity knowledge and security level in cyberspace is at an average level. (5) Students change their account passwords not at all (25.88%) or less often than once a year (39.87%), and use antivirus software to a greater extent (69.61% of respondents). Conclusions It seems advisable to undertake further research indicating what type of actions should be taken so that students would strive to improve their cyberspace security.

Keywords

• knowledge
• student
• cyber security
• internet
• remote education