Abstract:

Since the academic year 1992-1993, the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) of Castellón is teaching Public Administration and Management studies, with a three years pre-Bologna curriculum, and called Diploma in Management and Public Administration (DMPA). The DMPA will expire at the end of the current academic year of 2013-2014 because, in 2012, a new Bologna degree in Public Administration and Management (PAM) started.

The old DMPA curriculum has some Information Technology (IT) contents in three subjects corresponding to the third, fifth and sixth semesters. However, in the new Public Administration and Management (PAM) degree (2012-2013 and 2013-2014), new information and communication technologies (ICT) were introduced in its Bologna curriculum since the second semester, as a response to the modernization of public administration, methods and techniques,. Some topics of ICT and associated approaches are eAdministration, Internet and Competence for Managing Information, Web 2.0, office IT, Business Cloud Computing, ICT project administration, quantitative and qualitative data analysis and Information Systems security. All these contents are distributed between two subjects: New Technologies of Information and Communication (GA1208, Basic subject, 6 ECTS, second semester); and Information Systems in Public Administration (GA1220, Mandatory subject, 6 ECTS, forth semester). The main objective is to cover the great lack of consistent and updated ICT skills in the active generations of civil servants, from local to European administrations. The secondary objective is to provide f ICT tools to the PAM degree students to be more effective for their own work during the degree.

We currently have academic results associated to GA1208 for the 2012-2013 academic year, and partial results of subjects GA1208 and GA1220 from the current 2013-2014 academic year as well, because both of them are taught in the second half of each academic year. In addition, we have all the results from IT subjects in the old DMPA to compare them with the new subjects. However, we only really need the last five years in order to have the closest promotions’ data. First, we observed significant differences between 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 promotions GA1208 students: qualitative differences as attitude and motivation; and quantitative differences as compliance and success rates. Second, the last student promotions of DMPA students had a higher percentage of students working as civil servants but, on the other hand, there is only a small group of students working as civil servants in the PAM degree. Third, the bad results of 2012-2013 GA1208 students (30% of the total of 64 that enrolled GA1208 did not pass) has a collateral effect in the current year: most of the students that failed to pass have to carry out GA1208 (and another subject from the first and second semesters) at the same time as third and fourth semesters subjects. Fourth, the 20 students enrolled in GA1220 are working with a high degree of efficiency.

The aim of this work is to analyze the past and current situation of GA1208 and GA1220 subjects (2012-2013 and second semester of 2013-2014), comparing them against the results of the corresponding subject in the old Diploma. Afterwards, we will describe a set of methodological and learning solutions to improve the future results and to collaborate with the University Teaching Support Unit in order to change the present situation.

Keywords:

Public Management and Administration Degree, new Information and Communication Technologies, Diploma in Management and Public Administration.