Supporting Career Skills Development: Exploring Stakeholders’ Perceptions of College Students’ Participation in an Enterprise Internship Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Abstract

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in March 2020 resulted in hundreds of companies canceling internships for college students who had accepted offers for the summer. While colleges and companies were determining how to move forward, a team of recruiters and learning professionals at a global telecommunications company engaged thousands of students in a massive open online course (MOOC) that may have fulfilled internships for some students. This novel approach to learning provided students with access to an employer-developed curriculum utilizing an enterprise internship MOOC model. This study centered on understanding career services professionals’ perspectives of an enterprise internship MOOC for supporting college students’ career skills development. Employing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) and the product market fit pyramid, this qualitative research explored the enterprise internship MOOC’s viability. Data collection and analysis consisted of semi-structured interviews with 11 career services professionals from higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United States. Five out of 11 participants had experience with the enterprise internship MOOC while the remaining participants learned about it during the study. The artifacts collected from the web included the enterprise internship MOOC’s curricula, students’ comments on LinkedIn about their experiences in the program, skills information from the digital badge, and the company’s marketing materials for the program. To better understand career services professionals’ experiences with MOOCs, participants answered questions through the lens of a conceptual framework that deconstructed the MOOC’s dimensions, aligning academic MOOCs and the enterprise internship MOOC. Data analysis utilizing the CGT methodology yielded a grounded theory called the triad of stakeholder involvement. This grounded theory supports a focused approach to understand the HEI’s career emphasis, employer skills needs, and student destination for career skills development leveraging an enterprise internship MOOC. Data analysis also led to the conclusion that the enterprise internship MOOC is a viable model, given the appropriate pedagogical and technological structure.