Teaching Public Administration Skills through Online Skills Simulations

I am currently reading Dr. Michael Smith's The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (2023). Dr. Smith argues that American higher education faces systemic injustices and unsustainability due to its scarcity-based model. He proposes that advances in digital technology can create abundant educational resources and opportunities that will transform higher education into more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced.

His Abundant University vision is that digital technology will enable more personalized, accessible, and affordable education for more students, especially those left behind by the current system. He also foresees that digital technology will challenge the credentialing monopoly of colleges and universities while encouraging employers to hire more skill-based employees.

We see more state governments eliminate college degree requirements for government jobs starting when Maryland Governor Hogan dropped degree requirements for most state jobs in 2022. Since then, eleven more states dropped college degree requirements for most state jobs. Applicants can substitute experience or certifications when applying for jobs.

In 2007, I submitted a proposal for an American Society for Public Administration conference on teaching public administration. I taught for the University of Louisville's Department of Communication since 2000 and spent much time reading literature on good college teaching. Josh Bersin's 2004 book on blended learning and Dr. Roger Martin's integrative thinking model (Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto) influenced my thinking about reinventing my courses.

In my paper, I listed eleven skills that Goldsmith and Eggers argued are needed by public servants: big picture thinking, coaching, mediation, negotiation, risk analysis, contract management, ability to tackle unconventional problems, strategic thinking, interpersonal communications, project and business management, and team building. William Eggers (with Dr. Kettl) has been added to the list with their latest book, Bridgebuilders, but the original skills list still applies. The question is now how to teach these skills beyond the traditional classroom lecture.

I proposed a course design that combines integrative thinking and blended learning:

Integrative thinking: A model that helps students develop problem-solving skills by considering different perspectives, relationships, and options. It involves four steps: salience, causality, sequencing, and resolution.

Blended learning: A design that uses various media and activities to create an optimal learning program for students. It addresses different learning styles and reinforces the lessons through multiple methods. It aims for mastery of the subject through six modes of learning: reading, seeing, hearing, watching, doing, and teaching.

Simulations: The new course's core provides experiential learning and helps students develop deep smarts. The paper suggests two simulations, Virtual U (no longer available) and SimCity, which cover a government agency's internal and external operations, respectively.

?Supporting activities: The spokes of the new course, which support the simulations and provide feedback and reflection. The paper suggests five activities: lectures, readings, wiki, blogs, and WebQuests (an activity where students would search the Internet together for resources).

The course design was innovative for 2007 – especially centering the course around having students learn through simulations. But, sixteen years later, there are better ways to train students in the essential skills for public administration. I would still have simulations as the core of the training.

Thanks to the advances in simulation technologies, students can use a variety of simulations, from casual games on their smartphones to fully immersive state government real-time simulations that are digital twins of real-world state governments. Imagine training prospective employees in simulations based on the same processes they would use in their real government work. Talk about being ready for the job from day one.

Another change I would make is to educate government employees on using artificial intelligence (AI) to augment their work skills. I am working on short training courses to help government employees use AI. The AI will not replace their thinking but increase their ability to use integrative thinking.

In my twenty-three years of teaching, I have successfully combined learning transfer research with flipped learning. The goal is to help students rapidly acquire the eleven needed skills through experiential learning so that the knowledge becomes performance. I am studying the capabilities academy concept and how it can be adapted for public administration training.

As state and local governments recruit employees for jobs, finding candidates with the essential skills and experiences despite not having a college degree will benefit government agencies and the public in providing employment opportunities and skilled government workers.

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