Unit 1
How Ines Mergel teaches Unit 1
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how Professor Ines Mergel from the University of Konstanz teaches a class that covers the contents of Unit 1 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age.
The official designation of the course Professor Mergel is teaching here is "MA Seminar: Digital Governance".
We believe that context matters and a diversity of options around how the syllabus is taught can help others learn to adopt and teach the material well. To see how Harvard Kennedy School's David Eaves teaches the same unit, see here.
Who is this page for?
This page has been developed for use by university faculty who are teaching Master's levels students in Public Policy and Public Administration. It has been published to help them design their own approaches to teaching the digital era skills covered in Unit 1 of our syllabus.
Class Overview
In this introductory class students are challenged to consider why governments have chosen to invest in digital technologies both now and in the past. Through a conversation about the recent deployment of Coronavirus tracing mobile phone applications, students will be encouraged to consider why governments do often find exploiting the power of digital to be difficult.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this class students should be able to:
Situate the emerging theories and practices of 'Digital Era' government as just the latest in a wave of government practices, and explain the key values-based differences between the current wave and the last.
Understand why governments seek to make use of digital technologies.
Identify several challenges that governments face as being 'digital era challenges'.
Identify the capabilities that governments should develop to succeed in the digital age.
Define what is meant by digital for the purposes of this syllabus.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 As an introductory lecture, this class does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course and touches upon each of the eight competencies.
Assigned Reading
Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow & Tinkler, New Public Management Is Dead — Long Live Digital-Era Governance in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2006.
Mergel & Bretschneider (2011): Technology and Public Management Information Systems: Where we have been and where we are going,
Pre-class Assignment
Students are given two questions to consider prior to the class:
Why should the government invest in digital if a paper-based government works, too? (To encourage students to think about the issue through the lens of political philosophy).
What kinds of benefits are governments seeking when they invest in digital transformation of services?
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 90 minutes
The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class:
Introduction & opening lecture – 20'
Prof Mergel welcomes in her students and gets everyone warmed up by using a Zoom name tag game. This takes about 15 minutes, after which a short 5 minute lecture kicks off the real teaching. The initial topic is how the coronavirus response showed that some governments were now capable of responding quickly through digital means. Some of these rapid responses were thanks to dedicated teams that Ines has studied and interviewed in detail.
Exercise: Benefits and motivations - 25'
Students are then asked to present their reflections on the pre-class assignments (above). This is a chance to ensure that students perceive that governments undertake technical actions for fundamentally philosophical reasons. As students share responses, Ines clusters them into governments pursuing economic value, administrative value, citizen value and societal value.
Lecture: The current digital wave in a historical context - 5'
In a short lecture, Ines outlines how the current wave of digital era government is only the most recent of several waves of technological adoption by governments, waves that have often been accompanied by significant waves of 'public administration thought'.
Prof Mergel ends this lecture by talking about what the current definition of Digital is, or may be (and especially the role of the Loosemore definition).
Exercise: The challenge of building digital era government - 30'
In this exercise students are encouraged to consider Coronavirus tracking and tracing apps, which were developed and rolled out in many countries in 2020 having been unknown before this year.
Students are challenged to discuss why it was so difficult for many governments to develop, launch and scale a successful app. As they provide different answers, Ines uses these to signpost different challenges and topics that will be covered throughout the rest of this semester of teaching.
Wrap up - 10'
In the final few minutes Ines covers the requirements for the course, answers any open questions from the students, and assigns work for week 2.
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We are proud to use the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age syllabus in our curriculum and teaching. Developed by an international community of more than 20 professors and practitioners, the syllabus is available open-source and free at www.teachingpublicservice.digital
Why was this page created?
This teaching material forms part of the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age project. Read more about it here.
Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.