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Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience ConnectingMPA Students in Wisconsin and IndianaIn some cases, these projects may involve students from different classes in thesame program. The subject of this paper is less common: a series of collaborativelearning projects that involved students in similar MPA classes, in differentinstitutions and, in this case, in different states.Using entries embedded in a 69-page e-mail journal, the authors describethree collaborative learning projects, assess student responses to them, and offerrecommendations for instructors who might be interested in implementingsimilar activities across programs, state lines, or even national borders. Attachedis a brief overview of these three collaborative work assignments, and the lessonslearned from them.The authors are from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh (UWO) inOshkosh, Wisconsin, and Indiana University-Northwest (IUN) in Gary,Indiana. They conducted a successful two-semester collaborative learningexperiment with students whose only commonality was the simultaneouspursuit of an MPA degree. UWO and IUN are both regional campuses withintheir statewide university systems. Both institutions serve primarilyundergraduate students, but also offer selected graduate programs. UWO’sstudent population of 12,000 is roughly double the size of the IUN studentbody. Both Oshkosh and Gary have suffered from a loss of manufacturing jobsover the past quarter century. However, Gary is distinctly more urban thanOshkosh, and this is reflected in a more diverse student population.The UWO program offers a Healthcare Management Certificate and a LawEnforcement Emphasis in addition to its general public management degree.Concentrations in the IUN program include Criminal Justice, Health ServicesAdministration, Human Resources Administration and Public Management.In Oshkosh, most courses are offered on Saturdays, in order to meet the needsof working adults; several are offered as hybrid classes that incorporate both inclassand online meetings. IUN’s courses are offered primarily in the evening, ina traditional classroom setting. The IUN program has 180-200 students, whileUWO’s has roughly half that number. The UWO student body is about evenlysplit between males and females; the IUN enrollment is 70 percent female.BACKGROUNDThe collaborative effort began when the authors met at a social gathering,and discovered they were teaching similar organization theory MPA courses attheir respective institutions, so they began sharing pedagogical strategies. Theresult of that initial effort was a chopstick exercise, where students from eachclass were issued a pair of chopsticks at the end of class and told to use them attheir next meal, and report about their experiences at the next class meeting.Both classes found this exercise to be an informative and entertaining way tounderstand how workers in a machine bureaucracy (Morgan, 2006; Bolman &350 Journal of Public Affairs Education
Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience ConnectingMPA Students in Wisconsin and IndianaDeal, 2003) feel when they are given a task to complete with little direction, anabsolute deadline, and no indication of what the final product should look like.The IUN and UWO classes participated independently in this exercise and onlythe instructors compared notes on the outcomes. Both agreed that the exercisewould have been more valuable for the students if they had communicateddirectly with each other. Thus was born a plan to involve our classes in acollaborative project to interact directly with each other.LITERATURE REVIEWOur search of Public Administration and general literature produced noresults on education for inter-program collaborative projects that involvedmaster’s-level students. However, there was extensive literature, going back ahalf-century, on the value of shared-learning experiences for students fromkindergarten to college, as well as detailed instructions on how to conduct andevaluate them. After reviewing voluminous amounts of research on collaborativelearning in the classroom, Barkley, Cross, and Major (2005) conclude that“Virtually all of the compilers and synthesizers of research findings regardinggroup learning come to largely positive conclusions” (p. 17).Because the literature gives small-group learning projects many differentnames and definitions, the authors debated about what to call their pedagogicalexperiment. For example, Dr. L. Fink describes small-group projects as casual,cooperative, and team-based (2004, pp. 5-8). To Fink, casual small-groupprojects are relatively ad-hoc exercises that require little or no advance planning.Meanwhile, the other end of the continuum offers team-based learning, withsmall-group work as the primary in-class activity. In between the two extremesare carefully planned, cooperative-learning projects that incorporate structuredgroup activities.To Barkley, Cross, and Major, there is a primary distinction between cooperativeand collaborative projects (2005, pp. 5-7). Cooperative projects require students towork together on a common task, while the teacher retains a traditional dual role asa subject-matter expert and classroom authority. In collaborative situations,students also work together on a shared goal, but the teacher’s responsibility — aswell as the students’ — is to become a member of a community in search ofknowledge. Considering these distinctions, we chose to use the term “collaborativelearning,” rather than adopting Fink’s (2004) cooperative learning label, because wefelt the former term more appropriately conveyed the idea of students workingwith instructors to accomplish a shared learning goal. In Collaborative Learning:Creating Knowledge with Students, Matthews (1995) stresses the importance of thefaculty and student partnership in creating knowledge, a concept Fink (2004) doesnot address when describing cooperative learning.Journal of Public Affairs Education 351
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