How We’re Making Developer Training More Interactive, Flexible and Fun

Everyone knows security training is important. But many organizations struggle to make security training more effective. At Veracode, we’ve implemented several innovations to make our eLearning platform even more engaging, relevant, user-friendly and fun.

Over the past five years, we have continued to add online courses to keep up with the changing climate of threats in the real world, allowing development and security teams to focus on preventing common security vulnerabilities. Additionally, our general knowledgebase courses help train employees in any job role to raise security awareness, so organizations can meet their security and compliance obligations.

Because we understand that the effectiveness of training requires more than just quality course content, we’ve been working hard at improving the way our courses are delivered, including video-based learning. I’m also excited about new techniques we’re employing such as gamification to make the materials memorable and engaging for trainees. Plus, we’ve continued to upgrade the user interface of our eLearning platform to be user-friendly.

Here are the tops ways our eLearning team is improving the platform to help your developers – as well as quality testers, security leads and others – upgrade their security knowledge.

Gamification

Gamification of learning is based on the idea that people learn better while playing games. This notion is attractive to just about everyone, not just hard-core gamers. When we design online courses, make the questions and knowledgebase challenging but interactive with the end users. Nothing stimulates learners more than challenges, levels, certificates, badges, leaderboards and points.

Gamification provides the end user with a clear picture of where they are in the course and what to do next. Courses divided in several steps or levels makes the study goal easier to measure, and allows the user to progress gradually. It’s also less time-consuming (and less expensive) to consume courses this way.

So let’s game together!

Video-based training

Besides gamification, we’re making our new courses more interactive and engaging with video-based content. Watching videos is an easy way to learn, especially for users with limited experience.

Our series of AppSec Tutorial courses use videos to demonstrate how flaws are introduced into the source code, and step-by-step measures to prevent them. AppSec Tutorials address the issues in different development environments and languages.

As video can be resource-intensive on the end-user side, we keep our videos short. And to ensure the message is easy to follow, our video tutorials focus on one specific topic at a time.

Hosting in the cloud

The use of the cloud is on the rise because of the benefits to scalability and availability. Veracode has been using cloud hosting for our eLearning platform since cloud technology was in its infancy. As the cloud has matured, we’ve added more advanced features to our platform. 

Interactive design enhancements

At eLearning, we have begun including engagement and interactivity enhancements as part of our annual course review process. To reduce complexity and improve design, we’re replacing verbose text with images wherever possible, creating a more appealing and modern look and feel for all our course content.

Mobile compatible

To make our courses easier to access and help learners be more efficient, we have been working to convert all existing courses to be HTML5 compatible. Whether you’re using a smartphone, iPad or tablet, our courses are accessible, anywhere, anytime!

Veracode eLearning

Training your developers to code more securely is far more cost-efficient than addressing security only at the testing stage. Find out how Veracode eLearning can help improve the security skills of developers with any level of experience.