U9D1-28 - Exploring Outcome-Based Evaluation Options - Please follow all instructions outlined below. Do not skip anything. Readings and Forms are attached.

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APPLYING WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED

Hello! This is Dr. Yvonne Kochanowski, and you’ve probably heard my voice before in other courses!

I wanted to tell you a little bit about the importance of the topics you’ve learned in this course and how it fits within your DPA program. You undoubtedly have plenty of ideas at this point about what you want to do for your action research dissertation, and this course has provided with you some of the tools you’ll need to make that happen!

More than just the dissertation – because believe me, there will be a life for you again after the DPA is completed – this course teaches you how to work in your community. Think about all of the public problems that require a needs assessment to justify taking action, and the planning that must go into the project to make it happen!

Think about all of the needs we have in our communities and the methods to address them! Whether it’s keeping someone who wants to stay in their home out of a nursing institution, making a community safe through community policing, solving public health problems by finding better nutrition sources, or creating better recycling laws to make bottle and can removal worth someone’s while, we have lots of problems to solve. I bet you can add quite a few of your own to my list!

Through my consulting work over the years, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work on many public projects, and I can tell you from experience that the skills you have acquired in this course will help you in many venues in the future. Most immediately, these competencies will be handy in your second field experience course and in your dissertation.

In the second field experience, DPA8484, you will be working within your community to identify a community problem that needs attention. Understanding how to control the scope of this problem, something we worked on in this course, will be very valuable to you here!

You will also be asked to describe the problem in terms of a research question, and then work with various stakeholders, both inside and outside of government, to understand the issue. Again, understanding who you need to talk to and what perspective they may bring will be essential to your understanding.

There will many different types of data used to inform your field experiences and your dissertation! These includes the literature, surveys of parties interested in your issue, databases that you will mine for statistics, and other sources too numerous to list. With this in mind, understanding how to organize and utilize the information to improve government and public decision-making will apply well in future courses and in your professional life.

Finally, planning will be a key component of your future field experiences as well as your action research dissertation. You will be managing a group process in the dissertation, which includes all of the functions that you became familiar with in this course. In particular, the ability to design and implement the action plan of what needs to be accomplished and then understand how to evaluate success will help you tremendously.

As you probably noted in a couple of places in this course, your skills and competencies are building from course to course in the DPA program. You will find that as you continue, you will be using many different facets of these experiences to fuel your work! Now is a good time to reflect on all that you have learned over the past quarters in the DAP program, in preparation for the sprint to the finish you have ahead of you. Best of luck!

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Subject Matter Expert:

Interactive Design:

Instructional Designer:

Project Manager:

CREDITS Yvonne Kochanowski, DPA, MBA Lori Olson

Brian Powers

Kristin Staab, Julie Greunke

L i c e n s e d u n d e r a C r e a t i v e C o m m o n s A t t r i b u t i o n 3 . 0 L i c e n s e .