Mads Kristiansen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen

Case Based Teaching

The case based education has evolved considerably since the Harvard Business School introduced it in the first decades of the twentieth century. Cases are now taught around the world in a wide variety of disciplines. Participatory and collaborative learning, using descriptions of decisions faced in real life by real managers, has proven to be an exciting alternative to more traditional forms of education, it is said. It is also said that the excitement of effective learning and teaching with cases provides a unique and extremely satisfying experience to the case teacher and the students. In this paper I review the literature on case based teaching and learning to get a closer understanding of the elements in case based teaching, how case based teaching can be structured and the purposes of case based teaching. After the review of the literature, I develop a course on “Performance management in the public sector” based on the insights from the literature review. In order to design a constructively aligned teaching and assessment I develop intended learning outcomes for the entire course, for each lesson and for the case based teaching related to each lesson.