A new portable digital forensics curriculum

This thesis describes the design, development, and resulting curriculum materials of a new introductory course in digital forensics. This course is part of a new certificate program in digital forensics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with an advanced digital forensics course and laboratory exercises that are currently under development. We are designing these courses from the ground up to reflect the multidisciplinary nature of digital forensics, by incorporating the knowledge of a curriculum development team including domain experts from the fields of computer science, law, social science, psychology, and accounting. To lower the entry barrier for institutions to adopt digital forensics programs, we are designing the curriculum with the express intent of distributing it as a self-contained curriculum package including everything needed to teach the course. At the time of writing, we have taught a pilot class for the introductory course and revised the curriculum based on our experiences and feedback from the students. In addition to outlining our program's progress and high-level goals, this thesis presents the introductory course curriculum in narrative form, for those modules for which I was the primary author, and a brief summary of those modules for which I was a coordinating assistant