Browsing by Person "Keller, Thomas"

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Digital educational escape rooms as a novel approach to cybersecurity education: An empirical study on learner perceptions of usefulness and usability
(2025) Keller, Thomas; Guggemos, Josef; Warwas, Julia
With the increasing number and severity of cybersecurity incidents, programs for security education, training, and awareness (SETA) have become essential components of organizational and educational strategies to promote information-secure behavior at the workplace. While traditional training is often perceived as uninspiring and tedious, digital educational escape rooms (DEERs) are a promising tool that combines immersive, game-based learning with authentic problem scenarios to improve cybersecurity skills. Despite their growing popularity in cybersecurity education, key acceptance factors of DEERs have not been systematically investigated. This study applies the technology acceptance model (TAM) to examine how perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use affect the intentions of target learner groups to engage with DEERs in SETA programs. A total of 217 participants, comprising trainees, students, and employees, played one randomly selected DEER from a set of three on password management, privacy and data security, and social engineering. After completion, participants evaluated the learning environment using a standardized TAM-based questionnaire. Structural equation modeling revealed that perceived usefulness was the strongest predictor of learners’ intentions to engage with DEERs. Perceived ease of use influenced engagement intention directly and indirectly by positively affecting perceived usefulness. Multigroup analysis revealed no significant differences across age, gender, professional background, or DEER scenario. These findings highlight the importance of balancing ease of use with the extent to which learners perceive the content to be meaningful, important, and relevant to their professional context in order to ensure acceptance and effective integration of DEERs into SETA programs.
Motivational framing strategies in health care information security training: randomized controlled trial
(2025) Keller, Thomas; Warwas, Julia Isabella; Klein, Julia; Henkenjohann, Richard; Trenz, Manuel; Thanh-Nam Trang, Simon
Background: Information security is a critical challenge in the digital age, especially for hospitals, which are prime targets for cyberattacks due to the monetary worth of sensitive medical data. Given the distinctive security risks faced by health care professionals, tailored Security Education, Training, and Awareness (SETA) programs are needed to increase both their ability and willingness to integrate security practices into their workflows. Objective: This study investigates the effectiveness of a video-based security training, which was customized for hospital settings and enriched with motivational framing strategies to build information security skills among health care professionals. The training stands out from conventional interventions in this context, particularly by incorporating a dual-motive model to differentiate between self- and other-oriented goals as stimuli for skill acquisition. The appeal to the professional values of responsible health care work, whether absent or present, facilitates a nuanced examination of differential framing effects on training outcomes. Methods: A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 130 health care professionals from 3 German university hospitals. Participants within 2 intervention groups received either a self-oriented framing (focused on personal data protection) or an other-oriented framing (focused on patient data protection) at the beginning of a security training video. A control group watched the same video without any framing. Skill assessments using situational judgment tests before and after the training served to evaluate skill growth in all 3 groups. Results: Members of the other-oriented intervention group, who were motivated to protect patients, exhibited the highest increase in security skills (ΔM=+1.13, 95% CI 0.82-1.45), outperforming both the self-oriented intervention group (ΔM=+0.55, 95% CI 0.24-0.86; P=.04) and the control group (ΔM=+0.40, 95% CI 0.10-0.70; P=.004). Conversely, the self-oriented framing of the training content, which placed emphasis on personal privacy, did not yield significantly greater improvements in security skills over the control group (mean difference=+0.15, 95% CI –0.69 to 0.38; P>.99). Further exploratory analyses suggest that the other-oriented framing was particularly impactful among participants who often interact with patients personally, indicating that a higher frequency of direct patient contact may increase receptiveness to this framing strategy. Conclusions: This study underscores the importance of aligning SETA programs with the professional values of target groups, in addition to adapting these programs to specific contexts of professional action. In the investigated hospital setting, a motivational framing that resonates with health care professionals’ sense of responsibility for patient safety has proven to be effective in promoting skill growth. The findings offer a pragmatic pathway with a theoretical foundation for implementing beneficial motivational framing strategies in SETA programs within the health care sector.