What success looks like for Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age

It’s the end of July 2021. The pandemic is still raging globally, and people everywhere who are working to make governments better and more capable have never been busier, and have never faced such urgency.

Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age (TPSDA) is one tiny corner of this global movement for better government, so we too have been busy. This year we finished and published a free, open access ‘teach the teacher’ syllabus designed to help professors and lecturers teach current and future public servants the skills that need to develop policy and deliver services in a pervasively digital era.

Then, this June, to help educators make use of the syllabus we held a super-intense three day masterclass. It was an incredible occasion because our twenty four educator guests came from an astonishing sixteen countries. This geographic diversity led to the exchange of stories and experiences across language barriers and national frontiers in a way we suspect is very rare. We have captured huge amounts of this in video and text, and plan to use it to enrich the syllabus in its next iterations.

Finally, at the very end of July, we were delighted to announce the first full translation of the TPSDA materials, into German, led by Professor Ines Mergel from the University of Konstanz.

Yes, but is it all working?

It’s easy for a project like ours to celebrate milestones that are important to us and to our community. But why should anyone else care? 

That’s the purpose of today’s post, to talk about what we are trying to achieve by putting so much time, effort and resource into TPSDA, and to talk about how we will know if we are getting there.

Our overall mission, unchanged since we were created in 2019 is this: “To drive up the overall number of public servants who have the fundamental skills they need to succeed in the digital era.”

Our main approach to delivering on this huge mission so far has been to support and empower the people who teach students within Masters in Public Administration (MPA) and Masters in Public Policy (MPP) degrees in universities all around the world. We know this approach is going to miss many other ways that people learn public service skills, but it seemed an appropriate place to start.

But what, exactly, are we trying to achieve in relation to these MPA and MPP courses, and the people who teach and learn within them? Well, our simple ambition has been to see more people teaching crucial, and previous missing digital era skills in more places. 

But what do we mean by ‘more’? How much is enough extra teaching for us to feel that Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age is worthwhile, that it is succeeding?

We have set ourselves the key goal of seeing at least 10 university educators deploy our materials in their classes by the last day of 2021. Then next year we want to see at least 20, and in 2023 at least 40.

This is, of course, only possible if our open access materials are translated into languages other than English. Happily this has already started with a German translation just complete, and a Spanish translation currently in the works. Thank you so much to our community members who have helped!

Ten, twenty, forty is the most baseline of our goals: it is the goal that if we cannot reach we should really pack up and try something else. It’s also relatively unsophisticated, because it doesn’t tell us anything much about whether students are learning. But all projects should have a ‘It didn’t work’ criteria, and this is it for us. We are also fairly certain that if we get to 40+ teachers in 2023 then the community of educators will almost certainly have reached a critical mass that should be self-sustaining.

And how are we doing on this front? Well, virtually all of our 24 masterclass attendees in June committed to using TPSDA materials before they turned up, but a promise (even a very sincere one) isn’t the same as knowing for sure that something happened. So we’ll be checking in with everyone in our teaching community in December 2021 and January 2022 to find out if and how they were able to make use of the materials, as well as what actually happened when they did. And between September and December we’ll be running ‘Office Hours’ sessions for educators who want to ask for help or share experiences of teaching with the TPSDA materials. 

Don’t you have goals more ambitious than this simple baseline?

Absolutely. We know what really matters about education is that people take away skills that enrich their lives and make them more capable. 

What really matters for us is not actually that digital era skills are taught, but that digital era skills are learned, and learned by people who will end up making key decisions inside real  governments.

However we don’t want to impose evaluation mechanisms on teachers who don’t want to use them. So for the next 6-12 months we will instead be studying how people in our educators community evaluate their own teaching impact. Once we have deduced some patterns and lessons, we’ll develop materials and support mechanisms based on robust pedagogical insights that will be on offer for educators to use if they find them helpful. But we’ll never force: TPSDA is premised on the idea that we want to help overworked educators to succeed, and that means offering help, not imposing norms.

If you’d like to talk to us about how how you measure the impact of your digital teaching to either university students or public servants, we’d love to talk. Get in touch here.