Internships and work-based learning (WBL) are proven high-impact practices that enhance student retention and reduce the risk of underemployment, which exceeds 57% for certain majors (Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024). However, implementing these practices for online, working adult learners within National University’s accelerated four-week terms presents significant structural and pedagogical challenges. This article presents a chronological narrative of a grant-funded project supported by the National University Cause Research Institute (CRI) from August 2024 to May 2025.
Project Inception and Rationale: Bridging the Gap Between Learning and Labor
Internships and other work-based learning (WBL) experiences are recognized as high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008) that enhance student learning, retention, and post-graduation employment outcomes. When my team was asked to consider applying for a Cause Research Institute (CRI) Seed Grant, we saw this as an opportunity to identify and pilot experiential learning models that supported the creation of enhanced WBL experiences that met the needs of National University’s (NU’s) primary population of working adults taking courses online.
This work is directly tied to the Value-Rich-Education (VRE) pillar in NU’s five-year strategic plan by embedding applied, experiential learning assignments into courses (experience-rich) that connected students to valuable professional contacts who could serve as mentors and recommenders for their capabilities (connection-rich). The nature of WBL projects also tied to NU’s CRI mission to provide more applied research and solution development initiatives for students.
Brian Epp, NU’s Associate Director of Student Workforce Readiness recruited Paritosh Kaul, MD, a specialist in Adolescent Medicine and longtime faculty professional developer, to join the project team to research experiential learning models that could be used to guide faculty in developing meaningful, work-based learning experiences that fit a variety of use cases at the university.
Phase 1: Planning and Infrastructure
We conducted a literature review to identify potential experiential learning models that could be used to support faculty assignment and/or course development. We wanted to pilot the program to develop faculty champions to test the selected model, and then, over time, to evaluate whether the enhanced WBL curriculum increased graduate employability rates.
In a 2008 report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Kuh (2008) identified internships as one of eleven high-impact practices (HIPs). In a later follow-up study, Finley and McNair (2013) evaluated data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) involving thirty-eight campuses in California, Oregon, and Wisconsin. They found a 10% increase in self-reported learning gains for students who engaged in one or two HIPs (Finley & McNair, 2013).
Internships are also one of the best ways to reduce a graduate’s risk of underemployment, lowering that risk by 48.5% (Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024). A graduate is considered underemployed if their job does not require a bachelor’s degree and significantly underemployed if the job requires no post-secondary education or training. The underemployment rate is particularly acute for public safety and security along with general business majors at over 57% (Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024). Both programs are offered at NU.
Work-based learning (WBL) experiences provide graduates with a better starting salary and more confidence to find work in a related field (Finley & McNair, 2013; Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024). For the purposes of this pilot study, we include course-embedded employer projects, internships or structured service-learning experiences as examples of WBL.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate an experiential learning model as a framework to support faculty in the development of quality work-based learning experiences for NU students in their respective courses. Our hypothesis was that we could use an internship evaluation model to support faculty in the development a variety of optimized work-based learning experiences for students.
Selecting the Model for Our Project
We evaluated two models before choosing the Transformative Experiential Learning Model (TELM) that was developed by Andrew Allen, Assistant Dean of Strategic Engagement & Experiential Learning and Mike Bednar, Associate Professor of Business Administration and Director of Experiential Learning with the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois (Allen & Bednar, 2024). The other model we considered was The Internship Scorecard: A new framework for evaluating college internships based on purpose, quality and equitable access (Hora et al., 2020).
An advantage of the Hora et al. (2020) model was that it included a section on equitable access; however, because the initial phase of this study was simply to assess whether we could use an evaluation model to develop a variety of WBL experiences, a decision was made to go with TELM. The Transformative Experiential Learning Model was most appropriate to support activity design while The Internship Scorecard was geared more to evaluating delivery and student experience.
TELM is comprised of six elements, each of which has three evaluation criteria. Here are the six elements along with a description of each:
NU’s strategic plan for Value Rich Education includes Connection and Experience-Rich opportunities for students. Using TELM to support faculty in developing well-designed WBL experiences helps NU meet its strategic goal to deliver connection and experience rich education for our students.
TELM Team/Social Learning and Feedback/Guidance elements directly link to connection-rich education. The Fidelity element is the strongest link toward experience-rich by designing the opportunity for students to solve a problem that directly impacts an entity outside the classroom. The experiences can be further strengthened by offering students time for more Iterations of learning, by Integrating the experience to a students’ current goals and learning from other courses and giving students Autonomy to produce the best solution without too much prescription from the outside partner.
Barriers and supports to successful internship completion are well documented in the literature (Building Better Internships: Understanding and Improving the Internship Experience, 2024; Finley & McNair, 2013; Hora et al., 2020; Reid et al., 2023), We are unsure whether the evidence applies to NU’s working, adult, online learners and if virtual internships can eliminate some of the barriers faced by students in campus-based programs.
Recruitment and Implementation
Faculty recruitment was the next priority along with development of the faculty interactive workshop. Recruiting participants became an intensive, six-month networking effort. We networked with academic leadership to find a group of three faculty participants. Between September 2024 and February 2025, we spoke with leaders from the College of Business, Engineering and Technology, the College of Law and Public Service, the JFK School of Psychology and Social Sciences and the School of Arts Letters and Sciences. We also emailed all NU Deans in November to find willing faculty participants.
Recruitment was difficult as faculty had concerns about the time it would take to participate in the WBL workshop, to make the course changes, and the ongoing workload to manage employer projects in NU’s four-week terms should a project be added to a course. National University faculty also complete their annual faculty plans in April/May for the next academic year so by attempting to launch a project in September, we were talking to faculty whose time was already fully allocated so our request required them to adapt their academic plan or to simply add the work on top of their other priorities. In some cases, a decision was made not to participate because expected changes to the course would have required governance involvement due to learning outcome modifications. It took until February 2025 to obtain a commitment from three faculty participants.
Our first faculty champion was the program director for a psychology internship course. It was prioritized because the course was on the development schedule that was in progress at the time with NU’s Learning Experience (LEX) team who manages the course development process in coordination with the Schools and a Course Author (CA). We partnered with the CA and a LEX Learning Experience Director (LXD) to deliver the TELM working session as part of the normal course development process. We attended the course development project kickoff on 1/24/25 and delivered the TELM working session with the CA and LXD on 1/28/25. From there, the CA and LXD collaborated to embed the ideas from the TELM workshop into the design of the course. The course was completed with the end of LEX development cycle one on 4/6/25.
A second workshop was delivered on 2/26/25 to two program directors, one managing an undergraduate degree in our School of Arts Letters and Sciences (SoALS) and another who led both a BS and MS applied program in the College of Law and Public Services (COLPS). The two target courses for the second working session were not part of the regular LEX course development cycles so the work was done outside of that process with the support of LEX leadership.
After completing the initial workshop, the SoALS program director requested to withdraw from the project, citing prior commitments and a view that their current curriculum already contained most TELM elements. The COLPS program director successfully completed the project with course modifications being completed on 5/1/25. That course went live in its new format with students in NU’s July 2025 term.
Evaluation and Reflection
While the pilot’s sample size was limited (n=2), the qualitative feedback from participating faculty provided a powerful proof-of-concept for the TELM framework. Both participants reported a 100% confidence level that the model-informed assignments would improve student learning outcomes and engagement. The reflections captured during the evaluation phase revealed three primary areas of impact:
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Finding opportunities to shift toward social and team-based learning: one faculty member noted that the framework prompted a deeper consideration of how “the team aspect is an important piece of [student] learning and growth”. This participant specifically valued how the model helped effect a move beyond individual academic tasks to incorporate “teamwork [and] organizational culture,” which are critical competencies for the workplace.
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Authenticity through real-world application: feedback from the COLPS pilot emphasized that the value of the new assignment lay in its high fidelity. The instructor observed that “the best way…to train and educate security professionals is to have them apply the tools in a practical way at an actual facility”. Furthermore, the introduction of a peer-review component was cited as a success because it mirrors “what we do in ‘real-world’ settings to enhance security”.
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Strategic integration into course development: both participants agreed that the TELM approach should be a permanent fixture in the curriculum design process. One instructor recommended that this framework be offered as a “mindful intention” or training for faculty specifically during the initial creation or modification of courses, rather than as an external add-on.
This qualitative evidence suggests that the framework does more than just reorganize assignments; it shifts the faculty’s role from being deliverers of information to being designers of professional experiences. See Appendix B for the TELM Faculty Pre/Post Project Assessment Survey and Appendix C for the full results of the faculty post project evaluation survey.
Because the Psychology Internship was a new course, we could not conduct a pre/post assessment for that class. We did ask our COLPS faculty member to complete both a pre- and a post-assessment for how the target assignment rated against the six TELM elements. Table 2 is a summary of how the COLPS faculty assessed the influence of applying TELM to an assignment:
The +3 gain in both the Iteration and Autonomy/Uncertainty elements serve as a primary success story of the project, illustrating a fundamental shift in how faculty approached assignment design during the TELM workshops. By moving away from static academic requirements and toward the real-world logic of the Transformative Experiential Learning Model, faculty transformed a standard research paper into a dynamic, multi-stage professional exercise.
Before the workshop, the Iteration score for the target COLPS course assignment was a one out of five, reflecting a traditional one-and-done submission model. During the workshop, the faculty participant recognized that professional security planning is rarely a solo, single-draft effort.
After reflecting on the criteria for the Iteration element, the assignment was restructured into a three-week cycle. Students are now instructed to upload an initial field report in Week One, followed by writing a 500-word review of a peer’s field report in Week Two, where they offer suggestions as security professionals and colleagues. Later in Week Three, they refine their report based on the peer review that had been done for their report. This process allows the instructor to provide their feedback as the final evaluation piece. This shift allowed the instructor to emphasize continuous reflection and reapplication of learning, effectively mirroring how site assessments are refined in professional practice.
The most dramatic conceptual shift occurred with the Autonomy/Uncertainty element, which jumped from a zero out of three on the pre-assessment to a three out of three on the post-assessment. The original assignment asked students to describe a transportation asset, which often resulted in students simply researching pre-existing data about well-known locations.
The revised version requires students to select a specific, accessible facility in their local community and conduct an independent site security survey using a provided field report tool. The COLPS Faculty noted that this change placed students in the position of actually conducting threat assessments on real places. By removing pre-provided data and allowing students to choose their own facility and tools, the faculty empowered students with the agency and autonomy to produce their own results in a messy, real-world context. This +3 gain represents more than just a metric; it marks the moment faculty moved from being information deliverers to experience designers, ensuring that the four-week term remained academically rigorous while becoming more professionally transformative.
This pilot identified several priorities for future work. Continued efforts will focus on presenting NU’s Learning Experience team with TELM training so they can reference the elements as they collaborate with Course Authors to design our courses. We also plan to work with NU’s Academic Training Academy to propose a more comprehensive effort to directly offer this as a workshop for all NU faculty. Lastly, if we get more faculty to adapt assignments with the Transformative Experiential Learning Model, we could evaluate student engagement and success on these assignments using the Internship Scorecard (Hora et al., 2020).
Conclusion
This project demonstrates the potential of the TELM as a practical framework for embedding high-quality, work-based learning experiences into online courses for working adult learners. By focusing on activity design through TELM’s six elements, faculty were able to enhance the authenticity, integration, and iterative learning opportunities within their courses. Early faculty feedback indicates that TELM-informed assignments improve student engagement and deepen applied learning.
Although the scope of this implementation was limited, the findings highlight both the promise of TELM and the systemic barriers to scaling WBL, including faculty workload concerns and the logistical complexity of coordinating with external partners. Addressing these challenges will require institution-wide support, faculty development opportunities, and strategic alignment with NU’s mission.
Expanding the use of TELM can help bridge the gap between academic learning and workforce needs, reducing underemployment risks and advancing outcomes for NU’s student population. Future research should explore how TELM-informed design can be scaled across disciplines, supported by longitudinal data on student engagement, career readiness, and post-graduation outcomes.