Who funds educational materials on digital and AI for public affairs? They are hard to find.
We are having a hard time to find organisations that can fund the development of open-access materials on digital technologies and AI in the public sector.
Pontus Westerberg, Executive Director
We recently reviewed 200 master’s programmes in public policy across the United States and Europe and found that only one included a core course on AI governance and that only 29 included any core course on digital at all. This means that the vast majority of students preparing for careers in public service will graduate without learning how to oversee the technologies that are reshaping the institutions that they will work in. When I posted about this on LinkedIn last week, I received a lot of comments from both academics and practitioners. It seems that our research really hit a nerve.
I’m convinced that the lack of digital courses in public affairs educations can be fixed. Over the past few years, our work at Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age has shown that we can make progress. Our digital government syllabus and related resources are now used by nearly 100 universities in more than 25 countries, supporting professors who want to integrate digital-era topics into their public policy teaching. What began as a volunteer effort to help a few educators has become a growing global movement to modernise public policy education for the digital age and we are now a fair way towards our target of influencing the training of 500,000 current and future public officials by 2030.
We are very grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies, Schmidt Futures and the Public Interest Technology Fund who two years ago took a bet on our fledgling but high-potential project and provided the seed funding to enable us to professionalise our work. But much work remains. As we saw from our review of university programmes, while a growing number of universities preparing students for a career in public service are offering elective courses on digital government, AI and public interest technology, there are still very few core courses available.
We are now ready to further scale and expand our work, particularly focused on AI in government, but when we look for funding to develop new educational materials and train more professors, we are surprised by how little there seems to be. If there are organisations funding digital government education and development of curricula for future public servants, they are difficult to find.
I have spoken to lots of funders in the last year. What I can see is that funds are either directed towards training people already working in government or for research. Google.org, for example, has provided support to organisations like Apolitical, InnovateUS and the Partnership for Public Service to help public servants build digital and AI skills (although they’ve said they will not fund any more work in this area). UNESCO, Oxford University and the Kenya School of Government are launching a new MOOC on AI and digital transformation for public servants next week. On the other hand, grantmakers in the higher education space, such as the Spencer Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation, are focused on research, not the development of curricula and educational materials.
Between research and training seems to lie what you might call a missing middle. At one end, there is a growing interest in research on AI ethics, governance and safety. At the other, there has been some funding available to teach current public servants how to use new technologies. What’s missing is support for the people who translate that knowledge into teaching - professors who design courses, update curricula and prepare students for a career in digital and AI-era government.
In the past few years, we’ve seen how much appetite there is to teach these topics. Our network now includes hundreds of professors and educators in schools of public policy and administration who are looking for ways to bring AI and digital governance into their classrooms. They need class designs, lesson plans, teaching case studies and other materials that they can use to design courses.
The interest is there, but we are missing the resources and support to meet it. Where can we find it?