When public administration education switches online: Student perceptions during COVID-19
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/01447394221119092 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Teaching Public Administration
2023, Vol. 41(1) 122–142
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/01447394221119092
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When public administration
education switches online:
Student perceptions during
COVID-19
Stuti Rawat
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Yifei Yan
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK; University of Southampton, UK
Alfred M Wu
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Lina Vyas
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
Public administration education is traditionally known for its emphasis on interaction,
discussion and experiential learning, which require effective in-person instructions. With
COVID-19 pushing many programmes across the globe to be delivered online rather than
in person, how this shift has affected the student experience in public administration
programmes has been a pertinent and important consideration. This paper addre sses the
question through two surveys of 147 students in total, at a graduate-level public policy
school in Singapore. Two distinctive waves of data collection allow us to capture a
nuanced picture of student perceptions both when online teaching was introduced as an
emergency response and when it was planned as a deliberate strategy later on. Our
findings suggest that students consistently reported a decline in participation and in-
teraction in an online setting, compared with a face-to-face setting. Our study fills a critical
gap in the literature related to online public administration education in Asia, while the
immediate constraints it highlights and lessons it offers on maintaining a highly interactive
Corresponding author:
Yifei Yan, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK;
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
Email: briayifeiyan@gmail.com
and engaging public administration education are likely to apply for educators elsewhere
both during and beyond the COVID-19 era.
Keywords
COVID-19, higher education, online education, student perception, public administration
education, Asia
Introduction
At its core, public administration education (as well as that of related fields of public
policy and public management) aims to inculcate and enhance what has been termed
‘policy work’skills amongst its students (Kohoutek et al., 2018). This is underpinned by a
fundamental acknowledgement that the work of a typical public administrator and
manager today is seldom restricted to traditional public-sector activities and analytical
techniques. Instead, it also involves communication, coordination, negotiation, conflict
management, sensitivity to human rights and diversity, and problem-solving techniques
(Jreisat, 2011). Exposure to international experiences (Hou et al., 2011) and the incor-
poration of local knowledge (Vesel´
y, 2020) is considered to be an important component of
policy training to acquaint students with diverse perspectives and encourage them to
contextualise it in relation to their own experiences. Accordingly, instead of relying solely
on the instructor, graduate courses offered in schools of public administration deliberately
encourage self-learning with an emphasis on drawing upon the experiences of the learner
(Savard et al., 2020). This places at the forefront a highly ‘interactive’educational model
for the discipline that combines pedagogical and andragogical elements in the classroom
through methods such as case studies, collaborative group projects, extensive class
participation and discussion (White, 2000), in addition to client-based projects (Meltzer,
2013).
All of these teaching elements/pedagogical tools that aim to foster interaction have
typically been created, developed and practised in a face-to-face format of a traditional
classroom. How, then, does such a classroom fare with a switch to online education?
Investigating this question is both imperative and appropriate given the large-scale switch
to online education that has occurred worldwide in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic
since the beginning of 2020. On the one hand, the constantly evolving pandemic situation
(Akter et al., 2021) and the ensuing uncertainty demand that universities have to be
prepared to shift to online education suddenly (see, e.g. Harvard University, 2021). This
suggests that lessons learned so far will continue to be relevant for online education in the
future. “On the other hand, having experienced the pandemic for over two years presents
an opportunity to investigate whether and how the experiences of public administration
students varied in relation to online education when it was implemented as an emergency
response measure in the initial stages of the pandemic, as compared to when it was
introduced later in the pandemic in a planned and calibrated manner.”
Rawat et al. 123
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