Forensics Education: Assessment and Measures of Excellence

In this paper we assess current academic and certificate based education and training programs in digital forensics education. Strong interest in the digital forensics field has led to a proliferation of education options in both academia and professional training programs. Yet, few studies have attempted to define quality attributes or measures of excellence for these programs. This study defines a set of excellence measures for academic programs seeking to teach digital forensics distilled from existing training documents, author experience and other studies. The expectation is that this first attempt to define program excellence will generate discussion and stimulate others in the forensics community to add their own measures of excellence in addition to critiquing ours. We also describe other needed components for digital forensics education in order for the field to move forward.