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The difficulties higher education institutions in developing countries face in finding adequate and relevant onsite student internship opportunities make a case for online internships. The purpose of this paper is to present an online internship model, developed over a two-year period, which challenged students to engage in learning-by-doing projects that addressed a key barrier in the implementation of ICT policies in public education, the paucity of audio-visual content in local languages.

The design of the model comprised the development of instructional videos by 340 interns, the evaluation of the videos by two interns and their testing by 31 interns through a field experiment using a between-subjects pre-test – post-test design in 54 schools. The process was repeated the following year with the field experiment replaced by the development of teaching manuals. The changes in reflective learning among 112 of the 119 interns who developed video content in this repeat round were assessed.

The field experiment found that the intern-developed videos improved Mathematics and Science scores among school students but not the attitudes to these subjects. Participation in online internships improved reflective learning.

The evaluation of change in reflective learning is based on self-reported measures.

The online internship model presented in the paper can address concerns related to inadequate internship opportunities, while addressing gaps in public policy implementation by systems such as education, health and rural development.

The paper outlines the design of an online student internship model and a methodology for implementing it. The study indicates the feasibility of a low-cost, large-scale online model of internship.

The growing recognition of the role of teacher innovative behavior in educational improvement has led to more systematic assessment of teacher-driven innovations, usually through expert panels. Innovative peer-teachers may be more closely aligned with the correlates of teacher innovative behavior than experts, and hence their participation in such panels might make the process more robust. Hence, the authors ask, “Do expert and peer assessments relate to individual-related correlates of innovative teacher behavior differently?”

Innovations of 347 teachers in India were assessed by an expert panel and a peer-teacher panel using the consensual technique of rating innovations. Structural equation modeling was used to study the relationships of the ratings with the innovative teachers' self-reported creative self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, learning orientation and proactive personality.

Expert ratings were significantly related to creative self-efficacy beliefs (β = 0.53, p < 0.05), whereas peer ratings were not. Peer ratings were significantly related to learning orientation (β = 0.19, p < 0.05), whereas expert ratings were not. Also, expert ratings were found to be indirectly associated with teachers' proactive personality and intrinsic motivation via creative self-efficacy beliefs; peer ratings were not associated with proactive personality.

The paper, through a robust methodology that relates expert and peer assessments with individual-related correlates of innovative behavior, makes a case for educational innovation managers to consider mixed panels of experts and innovative teacher-peers to make the assessment process more robust.