ACADEMIC INTERNSHIP PROGRAMMES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EXAMPLE OF AN INTEGRATED MODEL

In designing the curriculum of the new degrees (both Bachelor and Master) of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), academic internship programmes have been widely incorporated. Despite its importance, in Spain until recently internships have been poorly regulated and were subject to the voluntarism of those who have been coordinating the experience or tutoring students. In this context, an Integrated System of Academic Internships Management (in Spanish, GIPE), was developed in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid, which established the basis on which the internship program was implemented in the nine degrees involved. Several tasks were accomplished: first, we organized the management of the internship program and defined the responsibilities of the actors involved, second, we intensified our contacts in order to sign agreements with different institutions, third, we designed materials and tools for monitoring and evaluating students, and fourth and fundamentally, we designed and implemented a technological platform that constitutes an unique and comprehensive tool to address the complicated management of academic internship programmes. The paper briefly explains this process and depicts some of the main features of GIPE, such as its differential access to different user profiles: students, academic managers, managers from collaborating internship organizations, academic tutors and organization's' tutors. It also includes various modules that are arranged in different tabs: management agreements, pre-registration and admission of students, internship offers, students' allocation and student's monitoring and evaluation. Furthermore, GIPE covers all phases of the process (from pre-registration students, consultation of documentation, constant contact through the platform with automated emails, assigning tutors, generating documentation, ongoing evaluation etc.), but with the peculiarity that it has been designed as a flexible tool that allows adaptations to other contexts. With its increasing use and its adoption by the rest of the Complutense University Faculties (scheduled for academic year 2014-15), GIPE will become a comprehensive information system that allows to monitor in real time the past and present collaboration between companies and organizations with the university, contributing with no doubt to strengthen relations between the university and the workplace. The paper therefore presents an universal, useful and flexible proposal of academic internship management that can be adapted to different contexts while developing experiential learning opportunities that allow students to integrate academic theory and 'real world' practice, engage in research that explores the relationship between the two, and develop the professional skills needed for success in the twenty-first century workplace.