WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Patricia Shields, Nandhini Rangarajan, and Lewis Stewart
TEXAS STATE EXPERIENCE
At the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Levin and colleagues
(2005) used a faculty grading system as a quality control to determine whether
their Master of Education students’ “white papers” are posted to the Internet.
MPA capstone quality is controlled through a formal oral defense, and the paper
is defended at Texas State. 3 The exam committee consists of two faculty members
and a practitioner. The oral examination and paper are also part of the Texas
State MPA Program student learning outcomes assessment process. In addition,
significant independent evidence supports claims of quality. For example, in
1995, six students presented their work at the San Antonio American Society for
Public Administration (ASPA) conference. In November (1995), the PA Times
designated 21 of these papers “cutting edge” and provided a way for members
to purchase them. Texas State students presented two of the 21 cutting-edge
papers (Jane McFarland and Jeff Kaufman). Subsequently, five Texas State papers
have won the Pi Alpha Alpha award for best master’s student paper in Schools of
Public Affairs and Administration. 4 Further, the Texas State two-course system
for writing capstone papers has been explained in JPAE (Shields, 2003; Shields
& Tajalli, 2006) and other journals (Shields, 1998; Shields & Heichelbech,
forthcoming).
When the Texas State library approached the Texas State University MPA
Program, instructors were ready to move the digital ARPs to the Texas State
Institutional Repository. Beginning in 2003, Texas State began posting ARPs
to a faculty website. This was done because most of our students work fulltime,
and they wanted to review other students’ work but did not have time to
drive to the library. While the students were now able to review other papers
and see how their fellow students crafted methodology chapters or developed a
practical ideal type of conceptual framework, the faculty website space was fast
reaching exhaustion. Further, the posting and other website management issues
were taking increasing amounts of time. When the library collected the digital
inventory and began to post new papers, faculty time was minimal and the
papers were preserved using the latest standards and technology.
The magnitude of the surprisingly high number of downloads is
documented in Table 1. Using data easily accessible through a Berkeley Press
website, institutions using digital commons are ranked by average download as
of November 30, 2009. 5 The 294 ARPs had over 154,000 downloads, for an
average of 525.4 downloads per paper. The Yale Law School was the only group
of papers with higher average downloads (569.9). Cornell Law Library is third
(382.8). The average number of downloads drops off fast. For example, average
downloads of the University of Pennsylvania (ranked ninth) was 110.0, and the
University of Georgia Law School, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and
Connecticut College (ranked 10th to 12th) all averaged under 100 downloads.
160 Journal of Public Affairs Education