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Please note that our syllabus has now moved and can be found on our website here:

https://www.teachingpublicservice.digital/en/syllabus-index

This page is no longer being maintained.

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<aside> 🛠 See other units in the syllabus

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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.

Learning Objectives of this Class

<aside> 📖 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.

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How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies

<aside> 💡 As an introductory lecture, this one does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course and touches upon each of the eight competencies.

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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:

1. 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).