Happy hours, not office hours: Socially engaging cybersecurity students in a large online graduate course

Engagement is a critical part of student learning and student success. This is especially true in online classes where students have less interaction with their classmates and instructors when compared to traditional face-to-face courses. Research on engagement has shown that when students are meaningfully engaged it can increase student satisfaction and it may also increase levels of academic achievement, including grades earned and degree progression (e.g. Wong et al., 2024). This paper focuses on social engagement in a graduate cybersecurity program that uses large, expandable online courses as described by Whitman and Mattord (2023). Large online graduate classes (i.e., more than 35 students in one class) present a new challenge to educators who are traditionally accustomed to teaching graduate classes with much smaller enrollment. To help faculty meaningfully engage students in large online classes, this paper presents three strategies for faculty to synchronously connect with students in an asynchronous class: welcome events, drop-in sessions, and happy hours. Finally, this paper will also report the results from a survey administered to cybersecurity students in a large online class to measure their perceptions of engagement.