A discussion-based on-line course in information security with minimal assessment

We characterize and evaluate an on-line course. The students are supposed to reach fairly abstract learning objectives, that take students' every-day usage of technology towards engineering skills. Learning happens by getting involved in asynchronous discussions, after doing also some hands-on home-work. Assessment of individual learning outcomes is minimal. Instead the students are required to pass a large set of small scheduled tasks. Together with the teacher’s group-based feedback this approach still leads to a reasonable rise in the skill levels. We justify this claim with results from self-evaluations by students on four course instances during two years. Similar didactics may work well also in other fields than information security, if applied on a course that similarly has a basic course as a prerequisite.