Home Subscribe Login Contact Us

Quick Links:

Articles Editorial Board Reprint Permission Manuscript Submission Review Guidelines Ethics Statement Publication Contract Subscribe to PAQ

Latest News:

call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

More Information

PAQ Articles

Mode-Neutral and the Need to Transform Teaching

WILL MILLER
PAQ, Vol. 35 No. 4, (2011)

Even as public administration programs are beginning to come to grips with online education and the “death of distance” (Cairncross, 2001), there comes another shift in how we think about teaching and learning. We have somewhat reluctantly moved from a not too distant past where we were all “on ground,” towards a present of increasing online course delivery. Now we have witnessed a move to blended teaching, where classes are a mix of online and on ground modalities. The next stage may be an even bigger conceptual shift to “mode neutral.” Mode neutral is available both on ground and on line and yet is not really “blended.” Instead, mode neutral moves towards an online/on ground content delivery that allows students not only to choose which mode they will use for a class, but to opt in and out of either at will within a class. The geographical location of the student begins to have less and less relevance.
Further, and even more importantly for public service education, the mode neutral approach may help us teach and learn in a way that increases our students’ ability to provide transformative leadership. It can be argued that the movement from passive learner to active shaper of their educational experience, and the constructivist approach integral to mode neutral education, may be an important tool in helping our students to become transformative leaders.

Subscribers: Login to read this article

Guests: Subscribe to PAQ, or purchase individual article access for $10.
The article is not available for automatic download. We will email the article to you as a PDF file upon receiving your payment, typically within 24 hours.