Tech savvy and ethically sound: How Zurich’s Digital Society Initiative approaches digital skills education

How do you prepare students to not just navigate but shape the digital landscape in a meaningful and responsible way?

At the University of Zurich, the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) is tackling this challenge through an innovative set of interdisciplinary education programmes that combine technical skills with critical thinking and ethical considerations.

“The DSI was founded in 2016 as a bottom-up movement by professors, lecturers, and students who recognised the need for more interdisciplinary approaches to digital transformation,” explains Leyla Ciragan, Education and Community Cybersecurity Coordinator at the DSI.

“It’s about making sure our students can look at issues from technical, ethical, legal, and social perspectives.”

An interdisciplinary approach to digital transformation

The DSI’s programmes go beyond simply teaching students how to use new technologies — they aim to provide a holistic view of digital transformation. This means addressing not only the technical aspects of digital challenges but also the moral, legal, and societal dimensions that are often overlooked.

This interdisciplinary focus is personal for Leyla, whose own career path spans both humanities and technology. After earning a PhD in German literature, she transitioned to her current tech-focused career in her forties. Her unique background informs her work at the DSI.

“When I began studying computer science, I found it difficult learning all the tech lingo,” she recalls. “That’s why now I really enjoy translating that language for people from non-technical backgrounds to help them understand it.”

The DSI offers several educational programmes, including a Digital Skills Minor at the master’s level, a Digital Literacy course at the bachelor’s level, and the PhD Excellence Programme. Each integrates perspectives from different fields to equip students with a deep and nuanced understanding of digital technologies and their impact on society.

“Digital transformation itself is multidisciplinary. You’ll never grasp the full context or effects of something unless you can look at it from different perspectives. That’s why, for every course, we integrate a lot of critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and legal and social knowledge.”

“We’ve seen that purely technical solutions don’t work, because most problems aren’t technical, but moral or legal. Tackling hate speech online, for example,” Leyla says.

“If we want to solve these issues, we need to look from different perspectives.”

Learning by doing: The power of applied knowledge

Rather than relying on traditional lectures and exams, the DSI’s courses engage students through hands-on, applied learning that involves tackling real-world problems and puzzles. This approach fosters a deep understanding of digital skills and their broader applications, ensuring students are prepared to navigate and influence the impact of these technologies in real-world scenarios.

“We aim to develop courses where people engage on a deeper level than just acquiring knowledge,” Leyla explains.

“We show them how to use digital tools step-by-step, but the goal is for them to reach a point where they’re creatively solving problems on their own. Applied, hands-on workshops are so important because students learn much more when they are actively involved.”

This philosophy is embodied in the Digital Skills Minor programme, piloted in 2023, “which teaches all the digital skills you need today to succeed in your future profession.”

“Knowledge alone doesn’t change behaviour. We all know we should use different passwords, but how many of us actually do? Awareness alone isn’t enough. We need to engage people at a deeper level if we want real behaviour change.”

Spotlight on the OSINT course: Training digital detectives

Leyla teaches a module on open source intelligence (OSINT) for a project that arose from the DSI Cybersecurity Community, the Cyber Resilience Network for the Canton of Zurich (CYREN ZH). An instant hit with students, the OSINT course encourages them to act like digital detectives, using publicly available information to uncover hidden insights.

Although designed with cybersecurity in mind, the course isn’t framed in those terms — reflecting the DSI’s strategy of inspiring deeper engagement by employing multiple perspectives.

“We invite students to tap into their Sherlock Holmes genes and solve puzzles, invoking their curiosity on the topic. They have to learn digital skills and think creatively to solve the problem.”

“Open source intelligence is all about researching in publicly available sources — ‘open sources’ — like web pages, social media, or even analogue sources like newspapers,” Leyla explains. “The intelligence part refers to detective-like work — developing a creative mindset to research and analyse data.”

Learning “eye-opening” OSINT skills

The course starts with basic skills, such as advanced Google searches, which Leyla notes are often underutilised.

“Most people just type a few words into the search bar, but there’s so much more you can do. For example, you can use special operators or Google Dorks like `allintitle:` or `filetype:` to refine your searches and get much more precise results. This alone is eye-opening for many students.”

Students then progress to more complex tasks like retrieving deleted web pages and analysing satellite images to pinpoint geographical locations. The course also integrates technical exercises using Linux tools, allowing students to understand how data moves across the internet and where they might find it.

“Open source intelligence skills are increasingly important because there’s so much more data every day on the internet,” Leyla explains. “Some data is false; some is a security risk.”

“There are so many use cases for open source intelligence, from journalists checking facts to businesses researching consumer trends to human resources teams doing background checks.”

Many students found the OSINT course eye-opening. “Students were really amazed to discover how much information you can find out from a single picture posted on social media — some even found names and addresses,” Leyla says.

“They were all so fascinated with the possibilities of open source intelligence, and worked harder than required because they were so engaged.”

Navigating ethical and legal considerations in OSINT

Given the potential for misuse, teaching OSINT requires a strong emphasis on ethical and legal boundaries. Leyla integrates ethical reasoning into every aspect of the course, ensuring that students are aware of what is permissible and what’s not: “For example, we discuss whether it’s acceptable to scrape whole chat messages from Telegram for research.”

“Students learn to recognise what’s legal, what’s ethical, and where the grey areas lie. We even set up little traps, like letting them scan a QR code and then showing them what data we can read from their phones. It makes them much more aware of their own actions.”

Ultimately, Leyla acknowledges that while they can raise awareness, they cannot control how students use their OSINT skills.

“If someone wants to do something criminal, they can easily find all the methods online already. We don’t teach anything secret — it’s all available on YouTube. What we do is provide context and encourage critical thinking, to reduce the likelihood of misuse.”

Lessons learned from teaching digital security skills the DSI way

Creating interdisciplinary courses like the OSINT module isn’t without its challenges. Translating technical concepts into engaging lessons that resonate with students from different backgrounds takes a lot of work. Moreover, people from technical backgrounds don’t always recognise the value of integrating non-technical perspectives.

“A lot of technically minded people don’t quite see why they would need open source intelligence or storytelling for their discipline,” Leyla says.

“We still have a lot of work to do in convincing tech people of the benefits of interdisciplinarity and why they need it. How you talk about tech is important so that people understand it, want to learn more, and can see how it can be used in society.”

Despite these challenges, Leyla believes that the DSI’s approach is making a difference. “Our experience of running these courses indicates that interdisciplinarity is the way to go. People really engage in the topics, and then they learn what we want them to learn.”

Advice for universities on developing interdisciplinary, applied digital skills courses

Leyla’s advice to other universities looking to implement similar programmes is straightforward: start with adequate funding and plan for interdisciplinary teams from the outset.

“No single lecturer could create something this big in their spare time. The DSI started with bottom-up enthusiasm, but it needed funding to institutionalise it,” she says. “And planning for interdisciplinary teams from the start is essential. If you don’t, the programme will only be as broad as the perspectives of the people who created it.”

Looking ahead, Leyla would love to see closer collaboration between academia and industry to ensure the funding needed to develop truly interdisciplinary digital education and understand the industry’s needs for future skills.

“Then we could start implementing job roles that include both a technical focus and ethical and legal reasoning. If that could proliferate, it would be good for digital skills education and digital transformation itself.”

Shaping the future: A new approach to teaching digital skills

With courses like OSINT, and programmes like the Digital Skills Minor, CYREN ZH and DSI are pioneering a new approach to digital security education — one that’s as much about fostering creativity and critical thinking as it is about technical proficiency.

By combining hands-on learning with interdisciplinary teaching and ethical awareness, the University of Zurich’s Digital Society Initiative is equipping students with the skills they need to navigate and shape the digital world responsibly and effectively — and have some fun along the way.

About Leyla Ciragan

Leyla Ciragan studied at the University of Zurich, the Free University of Berlin, the Technical University of Berlin and Cornell University New York. She holds a PhD in German Studies from the University of Zurich and a BSc in Computer Science from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is the Project Coordinator of CYREN^ZH, a project of DSI, and DSI Cybersecurity Community Manager. At CYREN^ZH she is also responsible for the development of educational programs in the field of digital skills and cybersecurity.

Also this year GÉANT joins the European Cyber Security Month, with the campaign ‘Your brain is the first line of defence‘. Read articles from cyber security experts within our community, watch the videos, and download campaign resources on connect.geant.org/csm24