Public Policy Challenges of the 21st Century

This course is a highly engaging teaser to the bolts and nuts of public policy as well as to the undergraduate/graduate student experience at UVA. While I initially planned to take this offering in a longer span of time (one “week” of videos every week), I felt that I could not get enough of it and finished the material in less than a week. The insights provided by the course creator and the guest resource persons across a wide variety of issues were eye-opening and incisive. Even though I live outside the United States, the challenges and concerns presented are arguably “universal” or transnational – climate change, discontent with governments and politicians, bureaucratic inefficiencies and relations with other nations, among others, are issues that do not respect borders. Furthermore, as a casual spectator of US affairs, the material clarified a lot of details regarding the governance systems in the most powerful democracy in the globe. The importance of caring about politics, even if we are not professionally interested in it as politicians or functionaries, is greatly emphasized. My only suggestion to improve the course is to further expand the content; as mentioned in one of the videos, there are more topics covered in the in-person college course, where the material was taken, that were not included in this MOOC. I highly recommend this course to beginners in public policy – those interested to have a career on this field eventually or those who have already specialized in another line of work wishing to make sense of the apparent dysfunction in the political process.