During the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020, almost all EU universities moved to online teaching, to ensure continuity of education during the lockdown and to apply safety measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The effort to provide quality online learning has been remarkable, in terms of infrastructural investment, teacher training, re-design of courses and revision of admin procedures, to meet the needs of online students also in mostly F2F-based universities. Within this process, among several issues due to the emergency situation forcing institutions to find alternative solutions in a very short time-frame, work-based learning was one of the most critical points. Work-based learning is widely acknowledged as a fundamental part of the students’ journey toward professionalization, as it allows the learner to gain experience in real work settings, deploy there his/her knowledge and skills, assess them, and better design career development strategies for employability purposes. During the pandemic emergency, most companies continued their activity through remote working, or by applying mixed arrangements, e.g. alternating days in the office with remote work. Instead, many universities found it difficult to arrange procedures, tutoring, guidance and even internship places for their students. ON-IT intends therefore to focus on the development of guidelines and resources to design and implement meaningful remote internships in higher education. Starting from both a mapping of experiences from EU institutions, that has been done informally during the pandemic within university networks, and a review of present guidelines for a quality internship, the consortium will work on drafting and testing of remote work-based learning pathways. The outputs will seek to cover the overall system that allows work-based learning, including advice on admin procedures: whereby remote internships could be known and used in some subject-fields (e.g. computer science), many institutions yet organise only or mostly F2F internships, and remote internships require different procedures and tools also from ad administrative point of view. Together with guidance tools, tutorials and guidelines for teachers, tutors (of both sending/receiving institutions), other university staff, and of course students, the project also intends to develop learning materials for all the involved targets. Learning materials will be addressed to work-based learning and employability. Online work requires different skills than working in a physical place. Regardless of the duration of the present pandemic, it is likely the pandemic experience will change the regular way of working in all economic fields, at least for many graduate jobs. For this reason, the project aims to focus also on skills development for remote working, to provide students with further employability skills to increase their professional success in a labour market shaped by digital transformation. As piloting action, ON-IT focuses on the tourism field and aims at providing outputs easily transferrable to all fields.
ON-IT focused on developing guidelines and resources to design and implement meaningful remote internships in higher education. Through the project, the consortium also aimed to deepen understanding of remote work and to detect needs to prepare students for the labour market.
During the pandemic and in the phase of exit from the emergency period, one of the critical issues of regular activities of the universities was internship. Most institutions, while prepared for online learning, were not ready for online internships. Work-based learning, often represented by curricular internships, is widely recognised as a fundamental step of the student toward professionalisation and transition from education to work. Internship allows students to gain experience in real work settings, test competences in context, and acquire new skills. After the pandemic, remote working took different forms by testing hybrid solutions or becoming the norm for some categories of workers, but it was not a coming back. The future of work is also online. Therefore, universities should equip the students with specific skills to be prepared for companies that use full or partial remote working arrangements.