Abstract
The Freedonia Project was introduced in a required MPA human resources management course in Spring 1999 as an innovative mechanism to facilitate learning about how American public personnel systems work. The Project, a semester-long simulation that calls for students to build a public personnel system from the ground up, introduces nonspecialists to the functional aspects of public human resources management and makes explicit the high degree of interdependence between and among them. This article serves as an interim report on the use of the project and details the results of a four-semester pilot test of the idea in the classroom. Discussed are learning objectives and outcomes, project design, and student and instructor evaluations that speak to the merits of the Freedonia Project as a pedagogical tool, as well as to its strengths and weaknesses.
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