Project Courses: A Bridge between Academia and the Labour Market

In today’s world, education means much more than transmitting knowledge within the boundaries of the classroom. Educating students in political science or public policy implies bringing them out of the academic ivory tower and having them engage with real life processes in a professional environment. The key is finding the right balance between knowledge and skills-related learning objectives and designing a course setup that allows the students to immerse themselves in a real-life work environment while emphasizing the value of this process as a learning experience. The role of the teacher in this context is more that of a coach, a facilitator of the learning process, guiding the students in tackling the specific tasks. Project-based learning can be a useful complement to more traditional, theory-based pedagogical approach, providing an opportunity to bridge the gap between academia and the labour market. The Hertie School of Governance has been offering Project Courses as part of the Master in Public Policy curriculum since 2012. The concept is pretty straight-forward: students work in small groups on concrete projects, usually under the guidance and with the support of a partner organization alongside the course convener. After five years, the format is currently being revisited with the aim of ensuring more coherence and quality control. This paper looks into the challenges of the curriculum redesign in the case of the Project Courses. Some of the focal points are the role of the teacher as well as the relation with and the level of involvement of the partner organization (be it from the public, private or non-profit sector). Moreover, as this course differs both in nature and in structure from the rest of the curriculum, it is very important that a thorough quality assurance mechanism is put into place; this needs to take into account and support the specificity and diversity of the Project Courses while providing a reliable overarching framework at the level of learning objectives and assessment criteria. Lastly, the paper aims to provide some practical recommendations on designing a viable educational setup for engaging both students and practitioners and facilitating their collaboration.