The introduction of hackathons into educational courses provides valuable learning experiences for students because a learning-by-doing approach is encouraged by the nature of the hackathon format, and the hackathon outcomes can serve as evidence for students knowledge, capability and learning gains. Prior work on hackathons in education focused on collocated hackathon events in the traditional classroom setting and its introduction to the course as a one-off event at the end of the course. However, this is insufficient, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where traditional classroom education and collocated hackathon events have switched to an online format. Additionally, the online learning model poses challenges for educators and students (including reduced course engagement, interest, and likely learning) and one-off events are not sufficient to improve learning. So instead, we focus on analysing the integration of a series of online hackathon events into an online cybersecurity course and explore how this integration can encourage collaboration and develop a practical understanding by solving real-world cybersecurity challenges.

We evaluate interventions to foster learning and analyse its effect on collaboration and learning gains for students in the course. Our findings show that students attribute learning benefits to the introduced interventions that supported teamwork and collaboration, maintained student participation and interest in the course, and encouraged learning-by-doing.