Digital Internships

Digital Internships: Augmenting I/O Internships with an Online Course in
Organizational Psychology

Internships have become an increasingly valuable resource for today's college students. According to the Elon University Career Center, almost a third of today's college students participate in a formal internship or co-op program. Here at Elon University, three quarters of the May 2000 graduates participated in either a co-op or internship prior to graduation. The reasons for participating in internships are myriad. One of the most important is that internships provide students with opportunities to gain practical experience in their chosen field. Quite frequently, the internship is seen as a way to bridge the gap between coursework and application (Eyler, 1995; Katula and Threnhauser, 1999). As noted by Eyler, (1992) internships afford students the opportunity to deal with real world problems while analyzing those problems in an academic context. Moreover, students have the opportunity to actually try out the theories, concepts, solutions, and techniques that they learned about in the classroom in situations where there is more than just their grade at stake. Internships may also help students grow interpersonally, develop value structures, and become more responsible citizens. Many of these potential outcomes match very closely with the goals of higher education.

In addition to the intellectual benefits, internships provide many tangible benefits to students. For example, students often use internships to explore potential career options or in some cases find out which jobs won’t work for them. Internships also provide students with valuable networks and networking skills, skills that are difficult to teach within classroom walls. Finally, in addition to the benefits the internship experience provides for those students who wish to begin careers after graduation, many graduate schools look favorably at students who have participated in formal internship programs.

Although intuitively it’s easy to generate a list of benefits that internships provide, there are also a number of potential drawbacks to these experiences. For example, although many internships are designed to give students a wide range of experience and provide them with the benefits discussed above, many internships fall well short of this ideal. Even in the best planned internships students can end up serving as inexpensive labor performing menial duties often unrelated to the field or career path they seek to explore. A second possible downside of internships, one reflected by many faculty, is that of rigor. Gore and Nelson (1984) found that many faculty members were skeptical of field experiences in general and that they were unwilling to accept that those experiences were adequate substitutes for actual coursework. Ideally, students leave for internship and automatically make the connections between the concepts they've learned in their coursework and their experiences in applied settings; however, it's quite possible that these links are never made. Moreover, students often return from internships not knowing quite how to synthesize their experiences. They're disconnected from the academic resources and contacts that they would typically use to understand these applied experiences and once they return to school, they're disconnected from the internship itself.

The current project addressed the issues mentioned above. Specifically, one of the main goals of this project was to utilize online technology to create a course that would serve to augment the positive aspects of students' internship experience at Industrial/ Organizational[1] (I/O) internship sites, while at the same time offsetting some of the potential drawbacks of internships.

In collaboration with a group of undergraduate students an online 400-level Organizational Psychology course was designed to link together students working on internships at different organizations. Three students enrolled in full-time internships participated in the course. Two of the students were employed in the human resources departments of organizations in the health care field. The third participant worked for a local outlet of a national retail chain. The course was designed to utilize the Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) interface which, in addition to a user-friendly environment for accessing course documents, provided various technological utilities like a discussion board, digital file sharing capabilities, on-line testing and grading. The duration of the course was five weeks so the course was designed around five broad content areas. Three times each week students were required to participate in various assignments and discussions. On a weekly basis students completed a quiz and submitted reflection papers. Students also completed two career exploration interviews with other employees within their respective organizations and submitted a final portfolio at the end of the course. Students could also meet with the instructor during scheduled “virtual” office hours. These assignments are discussed in greater detail with respect to the rationale behind each component.

Assignments and Discussion: Students participated in a number of assignments and discussions designed to provide them with exposure to the theoretical and empirical foundations of organizational psychology. Utilizing on-line databases accessed through the Elon University Library web site, students could read articles from peer-reviewed journals. Students also were required to read selections from a text that they purchased prior to the start of the course. Using the discussion board function in Blackboard, daily assignments asked students to answer questions related to each days reading assignment. For example, students read theoretical articles on such topics as orientation programs, organizational culture and organizational commitment and then were asked to post their respective organization’s approach to each of these topics. Posting their answers to the discussion board allowed other students to see how other organizations approached these topics. In addition, the discussion board provided a convenient medium for students to ask questions of each other. This utility was used more extensively for the threaded discussion component of the course, in which students were asked to discuss their personal opinions about specific aspects of theories in relation to their organizations. For example after reading a chapter from the textbook on organizational commitment, students were asked the following discussion questions

In your opinion, do the employees at your organization appear to be job
satisfied and/or committed to the organizat?

At your institution (or in general) do you think job satisfaction and
organizational commitment are one in the same?

What could your organization do to increase job satisfaction and/or
organizational commitment?

Students earned points by posting an initial response on the discussion board but they could earn additional points by responding to other students by commenting on their initial posts or asking follow-up questions.

These assignments and discussion questions were designed to help bridge the gap between theoretical constructs and applied experiences. The overriding goal was to encourage students to take the theoretical concepts from the articles and textbook chapters and explore how they are utilized and implemented in actual organizational settings. Furthermore, by providing links between students, interns had access to multiple organizational contexts and their unique approaches to these theories. This component also lends structure and hence, rigor, to the internship by encouraging students to formally seek out procedures and policies that they might not encounter otherwise. This can be seen as an added benefit for those students in “good” internships in which the experience is well structured to begin with, but for students who end up working in an environment where there is little structure or they are stuck performing low-level administrative duties, this component may be the only time they actually get to explore meaningful aspects of the organization.

Students also completed weekly reflection papers, quizzes and career exploration interviews as well as an internship portfolio, however, aside from submitting these documents electronically, these assignments did not significantly utilize the online components of the course.

It should be noted that with only three students, quantitative data is of limited use in evaluating the relative success of the project. However, as part of the final portfolio, students were asked questions designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the overall project including 1) Did the course enhance the internship experience, i.e. help provide structure for the internship? 2) Did the internship experience enhance the course? 3) Did the opportunity to explore theoretical concepts in applied settings enhance your understanding of those concepts? 4) In your opinion, was the sum of the combination of the course and internship better than either of these alone? Although no firm conclusions can be drawn from these about the success and/or failure of the project, feedback from students was positive and it appears that the course met many of the goals outlined at the outset of the project. For example, one student commented on the convenience of being able to do the coursework when it best fit her schedule, “you can go to “class” anytime you want, whether it is at five a.m. before work, or ten p.m. before bed.” This same student also felt that the increased access to other students the course provided helped increase her understanding of course material, “I really appreciated their (other students) participation because it aided my understanding of the course and concepts”. Another student commented specifically on the benefits of the discussion board component, “The students offered well thought through questions to whatever I posted on the discussion board, and described what they were learning at their internships sites also. In a way, it is as if I experienced three internships this summer, because I learned all about the struggles and positive aspects the other students encountered at their internships sites.” “This also prevented me from feeling alone when I had a problem at (my internship site), because there was always another student there to express the same or similar issues with their job.” This same student summed up her feelings about the course in general by stating; “The students who participated (in this course) were able to receive an exceptionally rare experience in the educational system. We were able to learn and then directly apply that knowledge. This did not only help us to understand what we were learning, but also reinforced it so that we will keep it with us always.”

From a teaching perspective the question at hand is not whether an online organizational psychology course is better than a traditional one, but whether the combination of the course with the internship augments each component. Given that students are typically spread out geographically, the addition of the course can only enhance their experience at those sites. Conversely, having immediate access to organizations provides students with the opportunity to see how classroom concepts and theories are actually employed. Online technologies provide the framework to make projects like these not only feasible, but also invaluable to student engagement and learning.

Eyler, J. S. (1995) Graduates assessment of the impact of a full-time college internship on their personal and professional lives. College Student Journal, 29(2), 186-194.

Eyler, J. S. (1992) From pedagogy to andragogy: the role of an internship in the transition to adult learning. Experiential Education,17(4,5 & 22).

Gore, J. S. & Nelson, H. Y. (1984). How experiential education relates to college goals and objectives. Evaluation and Program Planning, 7, 143-149

Katula, R. A., & Threnhauser, E. (1999). Experiential education in the undergraduate

[1] Very generally, I/O psychology applies psychological theories to the workplace. I/O psychologists typically study such topics as job satisfaction, motivation, personality and group dynamics. Although I/O interns typically work in human resources departments, they frequently gain experience in many of the areas mentioned above.