This project explores the benefits of virtual internships, a form of work-based learning (WBL) (Mumford & Roodhouse, 2016) that are designed to provide access to industry-engaged, experiential learning opportunities.  This work foregrounds the opportunity for virtual internships to increase access and equity in providing WBL that serves adult, non-traditional, and underrepresented minority (URM) students in higher education settings.  The project engaged a total of 513 students, 97 industry partners, and 59 faculty/coordinators across 16 two- and four-year colleges and universities in the virtual internship model (see accompanying figure). All of these schools served underrepresented minority, non-traditional, and first-generation students.

 Virtual internships embody a constructivist approach to learning. Learners are placed in teams and work together on a project provided by an industry partner. The industry partner acts as a project sponsor, providing feedback and resources to the students that will help them complete the project. The virtual internship platform provides scaffolding to support student teams in completing the project (in the form of project milestones and deliverable schedule) and mediates the communication between the project team, industry partner, and educator as project deliverables are created, submitted for review, revised, and resubmitted. The platform supports and documents the development of critical professional skills including teamwork, collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, project planning, time management, and others.

 A salient aspect of virtual internships (and many WBL programs) is that they introduce a third-party (industry) expert into the traditional classroom activity system previously occupied only by the instructor and students.  This new configuration of the activity system (Engestrom, 2015) potentially shifts the instructor’s role and gives rise to substantially increased complexity that must be managed to ensure a successful experience for all participants. The virtual internship platform helps to mediate this increased complexity, providing a range of affordances including a real-time analytics dashboard that helps educators monitor project process and confidence, team collaboration, and the industry partner's satisfaction with the work students are producing.    This research suggests that the ways that educators take up and incorporate virtual internships into their classroom activity system differentially impacts the learners’ experience and intended benefits of the virtual internship model. Specifically, the different ways that educators incorporate a third-party (industry) expert into the activity system of their classroom can dramatically impact the learners’ experience and serve to reinforce or undermine the intended benefits of the virtual internship model. These findings point to important conversations that should be included in teacher professional development that accompanies WBL and similar experiences that engage learners and educators with workplace experiences and experts that perturb the traditional classroom activity system. (Jona, & James, 2021).

 The project contributed to understandings of the diffusion and sustainability of innovations (Cole, 2009) in cross-institutional contexts. Using a design-based research methodology (Wang & Hannafin, 2005), the project documented how the virtual internship model was taken up and adapted to each institutional context and whether this innovation was sustained. The project identified a range of local conditions that influence the adoption, adaptation, and sustainability of virtual internships across diverse institutional settings and a range of institutional challenges and innovative solutions that shed light on how institutions can support provision of experiential learning to new populations particularly those under-represented in STEM fields.

 The project achieved substantial broader impacts, primarily with high-school age students and their teachers/mentors both in and out of school time by providing opportunities for learning and career exploration in the STEM disciplines. Two statewide implementations (in MA and IL) were launched, and the model was also deployed in Summers 2020 and 2021 to support City of Boston Summer Youth Employment Program. In the final project year, 324 students from 15 high schools participated in virtual internship opportunities.  Significant growth in these broader impacts is anticipated by project partners, with a projected 700-1200 high school students served in academic year 2021-22 and 3000+ the following year.  The model has promise in supporting equitable access to early career-relevant employment and WBL opportunities that have become increasingly scarce for teens, particularly those from underserved communities.

 By integrating engaging and relevant experiential learning opportunities into undergraduate STEM programs in a scalable way, the virtual internship model developed in this project is positioned to help meet pressing workforce goals and better prepare a diverse population of students with the in-demand professional skills needed to succeed in the rapidly changing STEM workforce.  Although not anticipated at the outset of this project, the virtual internship model helped colleges respond to the COVID-19 crisis by adapting their WBL models to virtual delivery. The insights from the shift to virtual internships are likely to have a significant impact on how such programs can be designed to be resilient to future resurgences of the pandemic, or other disruptions to traditional WBL models.

Last Modified: 10/22/2021
Modified by: Kemi Jona