How to start and pass a course
Before starting the course, please read these instructions. Especially, completing the course section is important as the procedure for receiving credits is different than in other mooc courses.
Starting the courses
The course material is freely available, and you can read it without any account. In order to complete the course, you will need to answer the questionnaires, reports, and complete programming exercises. For that you will need a mooc.fi account that you can create at the right hand corner of this course material. The exams are examinarium exams and require prior registration.
Exercises in the MOOC courses
There are 4 types of exercises in MOOC courses:
Questionnaires
Questionnaires are typically multiple choice options, and they are worth of 1 point. Typically, you get two chances of answering the question correctly.
Project reports
There are two project reports. Detailed instructions for writing these reports as well as peer-review instructions are provided in the project descriptions.
Programming exercises
The programming exercises use TMC system. Each programming exercise is worth of 5 points, and can be resubmitted an unlimited number of times. The exercises are tested automatically, and they can be tested locally on your personal computer before submitting your solution.
Setting up the TMC environment and instructions for submitting the exercises is detailed at individual courses.
CTF puzzles
These puzzles are only for CTF portion, and they require to find and/or decrypt a hidden key within each puzzle. More detailed instructions will be given on the relevant course page.
Completing the courses
Cyber security base consists of 4 individual courses. You will get credits for each course individually. For example, if you are only interested in the first course, then you do not need to complete the remaining 3 courses.
You can complete the courses out-of-order but it is recommended that you read the material in order due to the prerequisites.
The exam courses are examinarium exams and require prior registration, and will be graded directly to SISU.
To complete an individual MOOC course you will have to gather enough points. The point threshold is indicated on each individual course.
Note that the projects are not immediately accepted once you have written them as they need to be peer-reviewed and checked by the staff. Projects can get rejected, in that case it is advised to contact the staff (via discord) to see what needs to be fixed.
Each MOOC course has a deadline, and you have gather enough points before the deadline. If you do not have enough points once the deadline has passed, the points are lost. Reports that have been submitted on-time such that the author has given enough feedback to other reports will be checked, regardless whether they have received enough peer reviews.
Once you have gathered enough points, mooc.fi will acknowledge that you have passed the course. There may be some delay between having enough points and being acknowledged for passing the course, especially if you have completed the course early.
Once the course has been passed, you will receive a notification email and the course should be shown at the completed courses page.
If you wish to obtain official ETCS credits in SISU, you must register the course through the Open University enrollment form to receive credits. The form is available either through the completed courses page or by following the link in the notification email.
On the enrollment form, be sure that you enter the email address you used to complete the course in the mooc.fi system in the Your email address on the MOOC course (in Finnish: Käyttämäsi sähköpostiosoite MOOC-kurssilla) field.
The registration has a deadline so do not postpone it. If the deadline has passed, please contact the course staff via email.
After you have completed the Open University course enrollment, you will receive course credits in the University of Helsinki study register typically within few days. (in certain cases, especially if the registration need to be done manually by the staff, this may take longer, up to several weeks, due to the holiday service breaks). You can view the credits in SISU or in the national My Studyinfo service.
Note that you have to do this for each individual MOOC course.
The 4 individual courses correspond to the two larger UH courses:
Introduction to Cyber Security (TKT20009), 5cr:
- Introduction to Cyber Security: MOOC (TKT200094), 3cr
- Introduction to Cyber Security: Exam (TKT200095), 2cr
Cyber Security II (CSM13204), 5cr:
- Cyber Security II: MOOC (CSM132044), 3cr
- Cyber Security II: Exam (CSM132045), 2cr
In the past, the students were required to merge the smaller courses into larger courses. This is no longer required due to SISU.