Decision Support System For Internship Management in Higher Education

Abstract

The success of the students' internship in business contexts assumes today a core mission in the future professional career of students. There is a window of opportunity to include a decision support decision in a higher education context that could help course coordinators to identify the best students and proposal, and, thus, increase the satisfaction levels of the overall assignment internship process. The proposed model is composed of seven phases which includes the evaluation process of students, proposals and the assignment process itself. The model can also be easily extended to support nine phases, which includes the student's choice of their internship place. The model is characterized to be iterative based on its structure, and also interactive by allowing the participation of the course coordinator and students in the process. The results obtained from four scenarios have demonstrated the validity of the proposed model and the high level of correlation between students and proposals in the assignment process.