A Learning Model to Improve Learning Outcome on Experiential Learning in a Multi-Phase Internship: a Case Study of the Internship Program of a Thai University

The internship is one of the crucial learning processes that provide a unique experience to combine what they learned in university courses and how to use it in the real society during their university lives as it provides the opportunity to learn through work experience offered by the external organization. Although learner can learn career skills through the internship, most learner cannot make good reflection and cannot learn how to learn from experience. We think the cause of this problem is that most learner cannot reflect their experience and cannot clear the abstract concept and apply it to the next trial. This implies that those learners can improve their learning through internship by acquiring experiential learning skills. In the internship in general, the mentor has the important education roles. One is to foster career skills learning, and the other is to promote experiential learning. However, in most case, the mentor is very good at career skill teaching, but most of the mentor is not well prepared to support experiential learning. In response to the above problems, to support learners to realized good learning, we provide a learning environment for the learner to support experiential learning. A guideline for the learner to let them aware of the critical concept of internship and experiential learning. Also, we provide a web system to practice reflective writing to understand and able to apply experiential learning concepts. In this paper, as the preliminary research to develop learning environment, the analysis of the learner learning activity of the current internship program and show the prototype of the conceptualization of the educational concepts to support the experiential learning.