2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

This is a live, tech-talk-style demo on using AI to speed up assignment and rubric design in Canvas. Starting from a single assignment idea, I'll show how AI can help draft measurable learning objectives, transparent (TILT-aligned) student instructions, and a full analytic rubric with categories, criteria, and appropriate descriptions. From there, I'll format that rubric for direct import into Canvas using the Rubric Import template, skipping the manual Canvas Rubric tool entirely, and import it live. Faculty review stays the checkpoint at every step: AI drafts, you decide. Attendees leave with a repeatable workflow they can apply to any assignment, in any discipline.

A demo of the Virginia Cyber Range's new "error state" exercise diagnostic tool being made available to all users! Before now, users and educators had limited visibility into the events that led to the instability of the environment. With this new tool, we can expose the shell history, system logs, and configuration files to users for analysis.

We understand not everyone (especially students) is an expert in these systems so, to help out, we additionally run the information through an AI to try and point you in the right direction. We hope this extra information will help you and your students!

Today’s brilliant minds are being recruited and conditioned to hack without remorse. The growth of CTFs and cybercrime is creating a new threat—Hacker Gangs. It starts with curiosity and then progressively increases to full-on hacking, as small wins receive appreciation from peers that once ignored these amazing minds. Join Jessica Gulick to discuss how we can create a Defender’s Code that helps our youth stay on the right path and make better decisions without hindering innovation and curiosity.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming cybersecurity. However, its greatest impact on education may not be the addition of new AI courses or technologies. As AI evolves from a productivity tool into an intelligent collaborator, it challenges long-held assumptions about what students should learn, how they learn, how they are assessed, and which foundational skills will define the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Preparing students for this future requires more than updating cybersecurity curricula; it requires rethinking the educational experience itself.

Drawing on lessons learned from the ongoing evolution of GMU’s cybersecurity engineering programs, this keynote explores the opportunities, challenges, and difficult tradeoffs involved in redesigning cybersecurity education in the age of AI. Rather than presenting a single institutional model, it proposes a practical framework of design principles that educators, academic leaders, industry partners, and policymakers can adapt to their own educational contexts while preparing students for an increasingly AI-driven profession.

GT Edge AI will be presenting on Build Your Own AI Cyber Home Lab powered by Dell and NVIDIA!

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming cybersecurity. However, its greatest impact on education may not be the addition of new AI courses or technologies. As AI evolves from a productivity tool into an intelligent collaborator, it challenges long-held assumptions about what students should learn, how they learn, how they are assessed, and which foundational skills will define the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Preparing students for this future requires more than updating cybersecurity curricula; it requires rethinking the educational experience itself.

Drawing on lessons learned from the ongoing evolution of GMU’s cybersecurity engineering programs, this keynote explores the opportunities, challenges, and difficult tradeoffs involved in redesigning cybersecurity education in the age of AI. Rather than presenting a single institutional model, it proposes a practical framework of design principles that educators, academic leaders, industry partners, and policymakers can adapt to their own educational contexts while preparing students for an increasingly AI-driven profession.

This 90-minute workshop provides a comprehensive blueprint for organizing, managing, and scaling a successful student-led Capture the Flag (CTF) program. Led by the team behind the Valentine-themed GMU HackFax x PatriotHacks and Marvel-themed HackFax 2025 CTFs.
Timeline & Breakdown:

• 00:00–00:20 | Story & Organization: Narrative on growing a student-led CTF to a 10-category operation, managing a 72-hour event, and securing strategic partnerships with AWS, Virginia Cyber Range, and other companies.
• 00:20–00:35 | Collaboration Ecosystem: Best practices for managing cross-organizational workflows between student clubs, development teams, faculty, and sponsors.
• 00:35–01:00 | Challenge Development: An inside look at the design process for different categories from development to deployment. The team will also break down how challenges were documented so anyone could learn them and how 3 skill levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced were accommodated for.
• 01:00–01:15 | Blueprints & Lessons Learned: Actionable recommendations, platform bottleneck takeaways, and a browser-based showcase of the Virginia Cyber Range Cloud CTF interface to demonstrate rapid deployment.
• 01:15–01:30 | Open Q&A Panel: Interactive floor with the CTF Development Team to answer audience questions regarding scaffolding, scaling, and student engagement.

 
Technical Requirements
- Laptop with stable network connection
- Virginia Cyber Range Account with ability to join Cloud CTF via browser

Have your students encountered issues following handouts or documents in the Cyber Range before? Have you ever felt a bit overwhelmed with aligning courseware to exercise environments? Or maybe you’ve even had issues with students jumping ahead of steps in an assignment, resulting in errors and confusion.
If you’ve dealt with any of that, you’ll likely be interested in hearing about our brand new exercise area feature, which could help alleviate those struggles.

In this session, we’ll highlight our Side-by-Side feature that allows integration with our courseware and virtual machines. We’ll explore key functionalities and capabilities that this feature provides, including:

-Displaying laboratory exercises and the virtual machine side-by-side
-Allowing students to submit answers to the lab questions within the interface
-Empowering instructors to download student submissions to review and grade

Join the folks from the Support Team to discover how you can incorporate this feature into your Cyber Range courses and enhance the learning experience for your students!

Skills-Based Hiring on the Digital Front Lines
How the DoW CIO is balancing academic pathways, apprenticeships, and hands-on capability to build a faster, more efficient cyber workforce   

In academia, the GPA is a vital metric of a student's discipline, theoretical mastery, and intellectual endurance. But on the cyber battlefield, the ultimate metric is operational readiness. This creates a critical tension: how do we bridge the gap between a student who excels on paper and a practitioner who can actively defend a network under live fire?


The Department of War (DoW) heavily values the foundational rigor of higher education, continually investing in traditional pipelines like the Cyber Scholarship Program (CSP). However, to outpace modern adversaries, we are expanding our aperture. Through our integrated Skills-Based Hiring (SBH) initiative and registered apprenticeship programs, the DoW CIO is shifting how we assess incoming talent. We are not moving away from academic excellence; rather, we are augmenting it with a strict, practical mandate: "Show us what you can do."

The DoW does not dictate academic curricula, but educators must be aware of how the national security apparatus is evolving its evaluation of talent. This presentation provides a transparent look at the DoW’s multi-tiered hiring ecosystem, exploring how we balance academic achievement with hands-on, skills-based assessments. By understanding these diverse pathways, educators can better advise their high-performing students on how to translate their academic success into immediate, mission-ready capability.