One-off elective ‘Policy Evaluation in Practice’ great success at Masters CSM
Last academic year, Johan van Wilsem, strategist researcher at the Netherlands Court of Audit, taught the one-off elective ‘Policy Evaluation in Practice’ to students of the Master Crises and Security Management (CSM). A great success, for both students as lecturer Van Wilsem. The course scored 8.8 in the evaluation and Van Wilsem himself scored 4.8 out of 5.0. ‘Very nice to hear. Doing it gave me a lot of energy.’
The collaboration was a success for both parties. The Netherlands Court of Audit is looking to interact with and make connections within the scientific world and ISGA, vice versa, is looking to interact with government institutions in The Hague. Educational Director Sanneke Kuipers: ‘It was a very innovative and honorable experience for us, to have an experienced lecturer from a national government institution located in inner city The Hague to come and teach a course in his field of expertise. For the course he tapped into his extensive network and experience with research projects in the field.’
Research into the costs and effects of government policy
The Netherlands Court of Audit audits all revenue and expenses of the State. They also conduct research into the costs and effects of government policies. Van Wilsem, as strategist researcher, is occupied with the latter. ‘I provide feedback on how to examine if your policy has been successful in combination with doing my own research. Recently, I did this by looking into the strategy on environmental crime.’
In the past, Van Wilsem has worked as, among other things, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor Criminology at the Erasmus University and Leiden University. ‘I’m definitely not a stranger to teaching. But when I discussed teaching this course with the people from ISGA, we were still living in ‘normal times’ and I figured: “I’ll simply go back to teaching, I can do this.” As it turned out, everything was done online and that was a new experience for me’, Van Wilsem can’t help but smile.
‘How do you keep things entertaining online? That’s what I asked myself. We all have experienced these days with video conferencing and you can’t help but notice how easily the energy can leak away. That couldn’t happen to me, I would also like to provide the students with a better learning experience.’
Interactive classes
Despite this, he succeeded in creating an interactive course, as is demonstrated by the positive evaluations. ‘How do you keep things entertaining online? That’s what I asked myself. We all have experienced these days with video conferencing and you can’t help but notice how easily the energy can leak away. That couldn’t happen to me, I would also like to provide the students with a better learning experience. I recorded the classes with my voice in PowerPoint and the students were able to look at them in their own time. And for the physical classes, I mostly collaborated with a guest speaker. I made them interactive by asking the students to send in three substantive questions in advance and made sure everyone got their turn. You really noticed that the students enjoyed being able to pose questions to, for instance, the director of the Dutch Research and Documentation Centre or a researcher from the Inspectorate of Justice and Security.’
Familiarizing themselves with the daily practice
According to Van Wilsem, the main aim of his classes has been for students to not only learn about the theory of policy evaluations but to also allow them to familiarize themselves with the daily practice. ‘In part, I’ve tried to give them with the lessons on policy evaluations and also provide an international comparison for this international group of students. But also classes on how to deal with situations when the person your evaluating isn’t happy with your conclusions. How do you deal with this? And what do we see going wrong in daily practice?’
Because of Van Wilsem’s busy schedule a follow-up isn’t in the cards for the near future, but if it were up to Kuipers the collaboration definitely wasn’t a one-off. ‘This experience serves as a shining example for similar initiatives. I very much hope that we’ll be able to organize and offer more of these in the upcoming years.’