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Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience Connecting MPA Students in Wisconsin and Indiana In some cases, these projects may involve students from different classes in the same program. The subject of this paper is less common: a series of collaborative learning projects that involved students in similar MPA classes, in different institutions and, in this case, in different states. Using entries embedded in a 69-page e-mail journal, the authors describe three collaborative learning projects, assess student responses to them, and offer recommendations for instructors who might be interested in implementing similar activities across programs, state lines, or even national borders. Attached is a brief overview of these three collaborative work assignments, and the lessons learned from them. The authors are from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh (UWO) in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Indiana University-Northwest (IUN) in Gary, Indiana. They conducted a successful two-semester collaborative learning experiment with students whose only commonality was the simultaneous pursuit of an MPA degree. UWO and IUN are both regional campuses within their statewide university systems. Both institutions serve primarily undergraduate students, but also offer selected graduate programs. UWO’s student population of 12,000 is roughly double the size of the IUN student body. Both Oshkosh and Gary have suffered from a loss of manufacturing jobs over the past quarter century. However, Gary is distinctly more urban than Oshkosh, and this is reflected in a more diverse student population. The UWO program offers a Healthcare Management Certificate and a Law Enforcement Emphasis in addition to its general public management degree. Concentrations in the IUN program include Criminal Justice, Health Services Administration, Human Resources Administration and Public Management. In Oshkosh, most courses are offered on Saturdays, in order to meet the needs of working adults; several are offered as hybrid classes that incorporate both inclass and online meetings. IUN’s courses are offered primarily in the evening, in a traditional classroom setting. The IUN program has 180-200 students, while UWO’s has roughly half that number. The UWO student body is about evenly split between males and females; the IUN enrollment is 70 percent female. BACKGROUND The collaborative effort began when the authors met at a social gathering, and discovered they were teaching similar organization theory MPA courses at their respective institutions, so they began sharing pedagogical strategies. The result of that initial effort was a chopstick exercise, where students from each class were issued a pair of chopsticks at the end of class and told to use them at their next meal, and report about their experiences at the next class meeting. Both classes found this exercise to be an informative and entertaining way to understand how workers in a machine bureaucracy (Morgan, 2006; Bolman & 350 Journal of Public Affairs Education
Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience Connecting MPA Students in Wisconsin and Indiana Deal, 2003) feel when they are given a task to complete with little direction, an absolute deadline, and no indication of what the final product should look like. The IUN and UWO classes participated independently in this exercise and only the instructors compared notes on the outcomes. Both agreed that the exercise would have been more valuable for the students if they had communicated directly with each other. Thus was born a plan to involve our classes in a collaborative project to interact directly with each other. LITERATURE REVIEW Our search of Public Administration and general literature produced no results on education for inter-program collaborative projects that involved master’s-level students. However, there was extensive literature, going back a half-century, on the value of shared-learning experiences for students from kindergarten to college, as well as detailed instructions on how to conduct and evaluate them. After reviewing voluminous amounts of research on collaborative learning in the classroom, Barkley, Cross, and Major (2005) conclude that “Virtually all of the compilers and synthesizers of research findings regarding group learning come to largely positive conclusions” (p. 17). Because the literature gives small-group learning projects many different names and definitions, the authors debated about what to call their pedagogical experiment. For example, Dr. L. Fink describes small-group projects as casual, cooperative, and team-based (2004, pp. 5-8). To Fink, casual small-group projects are relatively ad-hoc exercises that require little or no advance planning. Meanwhile, the other end of the continuum offers team-based learning, with small-group work as the primary in-class activity. In between the two extremes are carefully planned, cooperative-learning projects that incorporate structured group activities. To Barkley, Cross, and Major, there is a primary distinction between cooperative and collaborative projects (2005, pp. 5-7). Cooperative projects require students to work together on a common task, while the teacher retains a traditional dual role as a subject-matter expert and classroom authority. In collaborative situations, students also work together on a shared goal, but the teacher’s responsibility — as well as the students’ — is to become a member of a community in search of knowledge. Considering these distinctions, we chose to use the term “collaborative learning,” rather than adopting Fink’s (2004) cooperative learning label, because we felt the former term more appropriately conveyed the idea of students working with instructors to accomplish a shared learning goal. In Collaborative Learning: Creating Knowledge with Students, Matthews (1995) stresses the importance of the faculty and student partnership in creating knowledge, a concept Fink (2004) does not address when describing cooperative learning. Journal of Public Affairs Education 351
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