In the period from 15 to 19 October 2019, a third study visit to the foreign partner – King’s College London – was organized. The Study Visit encompassed the following presentations from featured speakers across King’s College London faculties and departments:
• MSc in Public Policy and Management, King’s Business School – Dr Susan Trenholm, programme director
• MA in Public Policy, Department of Political Economy, School of Politics and Economics – Dr Matia Vannoni, programme director
• The Policy Institute of King’s College London – Dr Benedict Wilkinson, Associate Director
• The Strand Group at King’s College London – Dr Jon Davis, Director and Professor Mario Pisani, HM Treasury
• King’s Online: Online, Professional and Executive Education – Karen Greetham, Head of Production
After highly engaging and constructive presentations, followed by Q&A by participants from the Serbian delegation, each day the wrap-up slots were reserved for discussions and reflections on the elements of given presentations that would be particularly useful in the development of the PPMA project. It was concluded that MA in Public Policy offered by DPE, SPE, would be particularly useful as a model, that elements of MSc in Public Policy and Management incorporating teaching techniques tailored for students with work experience can also prove instructional for development of modules. The teaching material developed by The Policy Institute, which directly addresses the problem of how to bridge a gap between policymakers and academia, has been found to be particularly useful for development of contents of interdisciplinary courses to be introduced in Serbia. This also holds true for practices employed by The Strand Group, such as participation of politicians in the delivery of courses, which could be directly replicated. The extensive wrap-up discussions and reflections following the presentations yielded important insights and conclusions regarding further development of the project, in terms of aspects such as the number of modules, the contents and number of core vs optional modules, distance learning modality of individual modules and the structure of the future accredited MA programme in Public Policy, which would be developed as a part of the project, in parallel to development of short cycle courses, certified by partner universities from Serbia, envisaged to be developed and ultimately incorporated in an accredited Masters-level programme.
