Improving student internship through collaborative curriculum design in Ghanaian polytechnics

The polytechnic institutions in Ghana are required to provide hands-on training with the necessary skills and competencies to students to meet the middle level manpower needs of industry. In order to fulfil this mandate, a student internship programme is an integrated part of the training of students so as to equip them to transit smoothly from school to the world of work. However, the existing internship programmes were unstructured and unsystematic and unable to equip the students with the required practical skills (Effah, 2005). Given the career-focused orientation of polytechnics graduates should be prepared for the world of work. Research identifies relevant conditions that contribute to the benefits derived from internships. These conditions, when well-managed, could create an authentic learning environment in the workplace for students. These conditions are: collaboration between school and industry, placement procedures, duration and time), and assessment procedures, and will culminate in the manner in which implementation is carried out. The purpose of the study was to investigate how collaborative curriculum design (CCD) in design teams of polytechnic instructors contributed to the design of curriculum materials aimed to improve student internship practices in the Departments of Hotel Catering and Institutional management (HCIM) in Ghana’s polytechnics.