The Organization
Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) is Estonia’s flagship science and engineering university. Founded in 1918, its mission is to be a promoter of science, technology, and innovation and a leading provider of engineering and economic education in Estonia.
The Challenge
TalTech’s cybersecurity faculty constantly recalibrated their curriculum to ensure students understand the current threat landscape. With so much complexity in this field, the department faced unique logistical and educational challenges. The school’s existing processes for developing hands-on learning tools could not keep pace with the demand for educational content. Professors dedicated an outsized amount of time effort preparing their lessons and evaluations.
The university had an immediate need to engage a robust technology partner that could support hands-on cybersecurity learning environments at scale. The ideal solution would free up professor time, be cost effective, and provide students with relevant and timely cybersecurity training.
The Solution
TalTech implemented RangeForce with the goal of overcoming its teaching constraints. The university introduced on-demand, cloud-based training as part of a new hands-on approach to teaching. With RangeForce’s library of pre-built skill modules, deploying interactive learning environments turned into a fast and simple process.
Today, TalTech uses RangeForce at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Students are impressed with the interactive nature of the platform and see incredible value in the ability to face-off against real cyber attacks before entering the workforce. Prior to using RangeForce, experience with cyber attacks was limited to theoretical discussions or threat intelligence reports. TalTech continues to explore other valuable applications of the RangeForce solution. Assessments are now incorporated into the graduate admission process, assisting the university in identifying and attracting top talent to its prestigious Masters in Cybersecurity program.
The Results
Previously, professors would spend up to 80 hours preparing a single cybersecurity course for a class of 100 students. That number dropped by 75% once RangeForce was implemented, with the same course preparation taking less than 20 hours to complete.
Similarly, RangeForce helps to streamline the assessment and evaluation process. It now takes a TalTech professor approximately 20 minutes to grade students with the help of RangeForce’s automated reporting capabilities. This process previously required about 16 hours per every 100 students, a prohibitively time-consuming endeavor.
Since 2016, RangeForce has helped train more than 700 TalTech students. Most importantly, RangeForce enables students to experience real cybersecurity concepts in action. Whether identifying and containing real threats or working with real security tools, TalTech students are better equipped to bring value to cybersecurity teams upon graduation.