Harvard Kennedy School course helps COVID-19 front lines
When Mark Fagan, lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, was putting together his spring course “Supply Chain Management for Public Service Delivery,” he was not expecting that he would be teaching against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Fagan’s pedagogy usually emphasizes experiential learning; because of time constraints, this course would have to rely on in-class discussions with public service professionals via Skype. The final project was going to be a 2000-word paper, rather than a deliverable to a local municipality or nonprofit organization, as is typical in Fagan’s classes. But by early March, the COVID-19 pandemic was exploding in the United States. Cities were shutting down, workers were staying home or being laid off, and American hospitals were beginning to see the kinds of caseloads that their counterparts in China, Italy, and Iran had experienced weeks earlier. The focus of the course began to shift out of necessity; how could a class...