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<aside> 🛠See other units in the syllabus
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This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 1 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part two of Unit 1 is taught here.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in a range of contexts. To see how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit, click here.
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
The goal of this class is to make students aware of all the complexities involved the digitization of government services. While this class is based on the pre-reading of the Singapore's *TraceTogether case,* instructors can choose other cases for which they can get insider's views. Possible cases include HealthCare.Gov, the Phoenix payment disaster in Canada, the Census debacle in Australia and the NHS healthcare records implementation in the UK.
Context for this this Class: In the early days of COVID-19, the Singapore’s Government Technology Agency and Ministry of Health developed and deployed the world’s first Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, in just eight weeks. Days after its launch, Singapore’s foreign minister announced plans to open-source the technology to promote international adoption. This class will use the TraceTogether case to introduce different issues central to the topic of digital government such as privacy, security, data management, design, procurement, and user experience. These topics will be further explored throughout the course.
A secondary and optional objective is to get students to begin thinking critically about when digital technologies can help address a challenge, merely serve as a distraction or worse, make a problem worse.
<aside> 📖 By the end of this lecture students should be able to:  Identify capabilities that governments should develop to succeed in the digital age.  Identify challenges that governments face as being 'digital era challenges'.  Identify assumptions that underlie the adoption of government digital services.
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<aside> 💡 This second lecture of the course does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course by getting students to brainstorm many of the challenges the eight competencies to address.
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As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class: