Developing a Smart Grid cybersecurity education platform and a preliminary assessment of its first application

The energy sector worldwide has embarked on a transformational process to modernize the over-a-century-old power grid under an umbrella term of the Smart Grid. This vast infrastructural upgrade and operational change involves integration of a variety of advanced digital computing, communications and industrial control technologies. This brings new capabilities, but also necessitates a re-education of the aging workforce and training of the emerging workforce. While training does exist, the training approach and the accessibility of that training is often at odds with the needs of the utilities. To support this education and training need, in this paper we introduce the beginning of a modular, hands-on and open Smart Grid cybersecurity educational training platform and supporting materials together with an assessment of a preliminary version leveraged at the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Summer School held in 2013. We base pedagogical pillars onto: (1) Active Learning that promotes analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of the content from Bloom´s taxonomy, (2) The theory of project-based learning, (3) Piaget´s learn-by-doing posture, and (4) Constructivist perspective of education. The main goal of this effort is to develop a complete, phased, and modular learning platform to provide the essential base knowledge and hands-on training exercises for understanding and demonstrating competency in Smart Grid cybersecurity.