This study exploits a natural experiment to establish the equivalence and/or difference in student learning outcomes between online and face-to-face public and nonprofit administration courses. Its main contribution is thus methodological. We will reexamine the online v. classroom debate - the face-to-face lecture is still the most effective…

The gap between public managers and academics has long been a topic of discussion in the field of public affairs. This article presents a successful strategy to bridge this gap: the creation and use of local case studies in executive education for Portuguese public managers. We found that the creation process, which included interviews with…

This paper reported the findings from 18 qualitative interviews of students across two sections of an elective, standalone ethics course in a Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) accredited Master's of Public Administration (MPA) program at a northeast university. The findings suggested that a survey of…

Public administration managers are confronted with new and highly complex challenges emerging at a rapid rate. This situation requires a reimagining of public administration education to prepare public administration managers to capably deal with these challenges. While the Master of Public Administration (MPA) is globally used as vehicle for…

Research on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has tended to have a bad reputation within the field of public administration. In this manuscript, I discuss the issue of impactful research within the field and provide an argument for why we should be focusing more on pedagogical research than more traditional avenues. Not only does…

Public administration has a long tradition of close connections to the field of political science. As the field of public administration evolved from a basic politics administration dichotomy, it became evident that the distinction between politics and administration was nebulous at best. As such, public affairs students need exposure to, and…

On the 75th anniversary of Herbert A Simon's "Proverbs of Administration," it is fitting to consider its place in the public administration canon, with an eye to contemporary realities. In Proverbs, Simon interrogated prevailing mid-century "principles of public administration." But even as he reduced in rank each…

Courses and training in public decision-making have often disappeared from Public Administration curricula. This paper argues that this is unfortunate as skills therein are severely needed to steer developments towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Whereas some see this as a macro development that befalls countries, this paper argues…

Case studies provide helpful teaching tools to capture the complexity of administrative problems from an action-oriented perspective. With increasingly complex policy problems at hand, more interdisciplinary, interactive, and discursive approaches to teaching are also in demand. However, the case method offers a broad variety of options for…

Journalists, politicians, watchdog institutions, and public administration scholars devote considerable energy to identifying and dissecting failures in government. Studies and case-studies of policy, organizational, and institutional failures in the public sector figure prominently in public administration curriculums and classrooms. Such a focus…

New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain are changing how the public sector serves constituents. Academic programs in public administration and public policy must adapt their coursework to best serve students in an increasingly technology-based world. This qualitative research analyzed 84…

Diversity, cultural competency, and global awareness are three broad and mutually reinforcing conceptual themes in the literature of American public affairs education that are rarely implicitly interconnected. A primary challenge has concerned how to teach these themes, either separately or in unison, when designing courses and curricula to…

The practice of evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) consists of systematically searching, analyzing, synthesizing and disseminating the best available research evidence to inform decision-makers about policy problems, policy tools, implementation options, and/or policy evaluation results. Identifying the best available scientific evidence is…

A substantial amount of scholarly work focuses on conceptualizing, theorizing and studying the policy capacity of governments. Yet, guidance for practitioners on developing policy capacity training programs is lacking. In this article, I reflect on my experience as a public servant in the provincial government of Prince Edward Island where I…

This article studies the organisational view inherent in a public management and leadership development programme. Organisational views are important to study as they guide and frame the actions of the members of the organisation. In the management and leadership development programme under investigation the organisational view was a…