Toward remote work: Online internship in time of pandemics
10.3280/exioa1-2023oa16045
The pandemic deeply affected the curricular internship in higher education since the emergency provisions included mobility limitations and companies’ closure. Since curricular internships are often compulsory for degree attainment, the universities reacted in different ways to ensure the completion of the study programme. This article reports on the collection of data carried out in April-July 2021 in the frame of the ON-IT project about provisions adopted by universities during the worst period of the pandemic emergency. Results are discussed, and the conclusion highlights the next steps of the project development to ensure the quality of online and blended internships to support the acquisition of employability skills for remote work.
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Toward remote work: Online internship in time of pandemics
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Vriens, M., Op de Beeck, I. De Gruyter, J. & Van Petegem, W. (2010). Virtual placements: improving the international work experience of students. Conference proceedings of EDULearn10, International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Barcelona (Spain), 5-7 July 2010.
Toward remote work: Online internship in time of pandemics
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Saggi e ricerche

Toward remote work: Online internship in time of
pandemics
Gigliola Paviotti *, Chiara Aleffi *, Annapia Ferrara°




Abstract
The pandemic deeply affected the curricular internship in higher education
since the emergency provisions included mobility limitations and companies’
closure. Since curricular internships are often compulsory for degree
attainment, the universities reacted in different ways to ensure the completion
of the study programme. This article reports on the collection of data carried
out in April-July 2021 in the frame of the ON-IT project about provisions
adopted by universities during the worst period of the pandemic emergency.
Results are discussed, and the conclusion highlights the next steps of the project
development to ensure the quality of online and blended internships to support
the acquisition of employability skills for remote work.

Keywords: online internship; work-based                     learning;    hybrid     models;
employability; digital transformation

Article submitted: 10/04/2022; accepted: 15/05/2023.
Available online: 20/06/2023


1. Introduction and reasons for the experience

   Curricular internships in higher education were introduced almost in all
European countries around the 1990s, following major reforms after the
agreement on the Bologna Process. Since then, internships have been common
in medical education since the 1920s, and in particular programmes,

*
    University of Macerata, Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism.
°
    University of Pisa, Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment.

Excellence and Innovation in Learning and Teaching (ISSNe 2499-507X), 2023, 1

Doi: 10.3280/exioa1-2023oa16045
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particularly in the USA, since the 1960s. An internship is generally understood
as work practice carried out during studies1 to favour the acquisition of
practical knowledge and skills (Daniels and Brooker, 2016; Moore and Morton,
2017), transversal competence and understanding of the world of work
(Farmaki, 2018; Kapareliotis et al., 2019), and support building of professional
networks for future work insertion (Stanton, 1992). Therefore, internships are
intended as work-based experiences with a high learning component.
    The usual process of the internships entails collaborative learning design
and joint implementation by three players – the student, the university, and the
company. Arrangements can be different, following organisational issues or
type of degree. Still, all share the same core process: this includes a preparation
phase (contacts and agreements between the future intern and the company,
definition of the learning outcomes and the tasks to be carried out,
administrative duties, such as insurance and agreements between the sending
and the hosting organisations), an implementation phase (the intern carries out
the plan as designed, mentoring by the supervisors, and monitoring of the
activities), an evaluation phase by the three involved players. There could be
challenges both in design and implementation, such as different expectations
(Sauder et al., 2019), difficulty in assessing competence-based learning
(D'Angelo, 2014; Riccio et al., 2015), poor supervision (Kai Wah Chu, 2020),
and in general unavailability of quality internships (Narayanan et al., 2010):
however, internships have clear benefits for all the involved targets, and well-
established in higher education, and integrated into regular processes.
    Yet, the previous consideration applies to in-place work only: in Springtime
2020, when the pandemic emergency forced Italian educational institutions and
a considerable percentage of companies to stop in-presence work, both
organisations appeared unprepared to face the challenge of online work-based
learning. While a significant amount of research and previous practices
supported the challenge of shifting to fully online learning, online internships
were uncommon or limited to specific fields such as information technology
(Ruggiero and Bohem, 2016). After all, also remote working was unusual: in
2019, an average of 5.4% of employed persons were working from home
regularly (Eurostat, 2020), which increased to 12.0% in 2020; in 2021, the
Eurofund survey stated that telework is to become normality in Europe, and
after the pandemic experience there will be “no looking back”.

1
  The specific meanings of the terms “internship” and “traineeship” are not commonly
agreed, and often used interchangeably. In this article, we keep the European habit to
identify with “internships” the programmes carried out during the study years, and
contributing to a degree achievement, and “traineeships” those learning programmes
carried out after graduation.

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    Benefits and drawbacks are associated with remote work: Pretti et al. (2020)
identify advantages such as flexibility, autonomy, productivity, job satisfaction,
and decreased stress; among drawbacks are loss of communication, reduced
support, and difficulty in work-life balance.
    Following work practice, online internships are likely to become common
in the future, either as fully remote or blended/hybrid experiences. Insofar little
research has investigated online internships in higher education: most of the
work focused on organisational and management issues, such as lack of training
of supervisors (Frank and Oliver, 2012), equipment (Irwin et al., 2021),
recruiting (Jeske and Axtell, 2014; 2018), difficult work-balance of the intern
(Allen et al., 2015; Charalampous et al., 2019). Also, some relational and
personal issues can affect the process, e.g., difficulty in building trust between
the company and the intern (Irwin et al., 2021), a feeling of isolation (Teng,
2021) and the need for a high level of self-regulated learning (Dabbagh and
Kitsantas, 2004) by the intern, little understanding of the company business
culture (Jeske and Axtell, 2014). Still, the advantages are potentially very high
for the involved players. Remote learning at work allows experiences that might
be impossible otherwise for distance and cost reasons (Vriens et al., 2010),
enabling participation in an international community (Ruggiero and Boehm,
2016). As regards skills development, an online internship also can foster the
acquisition of specific skills, such as digital skills, online cooperation skills,
etc., and support the intern in facing the increased complexity of the digital
transformation of the labour market.
    In Italy, remote internships, as well as remote work, is a pretty recent
phenomenon. Italy also has a level of digital skills of citizens and workers far
below the European average (Pedone, 2022), which hinders the shift to digital
arrangements. However, as in the rest of Europe, the pandemic experience
boosted experiences in both fields. As regards higher education, research
confirms that the online internship can significantly support skills acquisition,
particularly digital and organisational skills (Altamura and Disalvo, 2022),
decision-making skills (Massariello et al., 2021), self-direct career management
skills (Del Gobbo et al., 2021). On the other hand, for some degrees, the digital
internship was not enough to support professional skills development, as in the
case of social care (Bobbo and Moretto, 2020).
    On this background, a European consortium composed of five universities
and two networks of universities and companies undertook the Online
Internship in Tourism (ON-IT) project to develop an implementation model for
online internships for higher education institutions. The starting point for the
design was to understand how the universities dealt with the need to carry out
a curricular internship, which is compulsory for degree attainment. This article
reports on the findings of the Italian data collection. The overall project survey

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included 145 respondents (50 interns, 32 academic supervisors, 42 company
supervisors, 21 support/admin staff involved in the process) from 14 countries
(10 in Europe) (Stefanelli and De Giorgi, 2021). The analysis results will
support the drafting of a potential process for ensuring relevant online and
blended work-based learning.


2. Methodology

    The study aimed to understand how the universities reacted to the
lockdowns and the limited mobility during the pandemic concerning curricular
internships. In this study, an online internship, also referred to as virtual or e-
internship in literature, is defined as a form of remote work-based learning that
takes place over the internet and by means of digital communication tools (e.g.,
audio and video conferencing systems for communication, online shared
platforms for joint work, etc.). The aim was to identify the perceived strengths
and weaknesses of involved players to design an effective model of online
work-based learning.
    The aims of field research were, therefore, to answer the following
questions:
 The universities adopted which formats of internships during the pandemic?
 Which were perceived as obstacles or success factors in the adopted
    processes?
 Which approaches and procedures were used or adapted to ensure an
    effective learning experience?
 The study’s research question was: are there specific pedagogical or
    procedural aspects universities should consider in designing online
    internships?

2.1 Data collection

    Data collection in Italy took place between April and July 2021. The first
round, composed of an online questionnaire, ended in June 2021; the second
round, consisting of six semi-structured interviews, was carried out in July
2021.
    Online questionnaire (Q). The online questionnaire, based on the three key
areas of investigation defined for field research, was composed of: introductory
items related to the context (location, field of study, sector in which the
internship took place); description items related to the experience: length,
description of the tasks and the process; exploratory items: previous online
interviews experiences, challenges and obstacles; the perceived value of the

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online experience; suggestions and recommendations from experience (for the
respondent target).
    Semi-structured interviews (I). The semi-structured interviews were also based
on three areas of investigation, including questions such as introductory questions
related to the university offers for internships in times of pandemic; descriptive
questions on the experienced online internships; exploratory questions including
organisational aspects, activities (activation, monitoring, evaluation), challenges
and opportunities, and lessons learnt and recommendations.

2.2. Sample composition

    The addressed targets were the four profiles involved in the internship
process, namely:
 Interns;
 Support staff (officers of the career/internship centre);
 Academic supervisors;
 Company supervisors.
    The sample was composed of 81 respondents to the questionnaire from the
four key targets corresponding to the players involved in the internship process,
namely:
 Interns (I): 20 respondents;
 Support staff (officers of the career/internship centre) (S): 14 respondents;
 Academic supervisors (A): 19 respondents;
 Company supervisor (C): 28 respondents.
    Interviewees included two former interns, one higher-education career
counsellor, two academic supervisors and two company supervisors (7
interviews total). The average interview duration was 30 minutes.
    Interviewee sampling was limited to questionnaire respondents declaring
availability to be contacted afterwards (45% of interns; 47% of support staff;
73% of academic supervisors; 82% of companies): applied criteria included
type of degree (STEM/Social Sciences and Humanities) for academic
supervisors and students, the field of activity for companies and geographical
distribution. In the case of support staff, a convenience sample was used since
the time required by the potential respondent to get permission from the
institution was too long.

2.3 Geographical distribution

   All respondents but two were based in Italy, with the following distribution
across the country:


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Table 1 - Geographical distribution of respondents to the questionnaire

              Location                                                #     %
              Northern Italy                                          30     37
              Central Italy                                           40     49
              Southern Italy                                            9    11
              Abroad                                                    2     3
              Total                                                   81    100

  Interviews were carried out in Northern Italy (1 intern, 1 teacher) and
Central Italy.

2.3.1 Field of study/sector and internship duration

   The internship duration varied from a minimum of 120 hours to three
months.
   The most represented field of study of interns was Business and Economics
(25%) and Humanities (25%), followed by Engineering (15%). The most
represented sectors in which the internship took place were
Services/Consultancies (18%), Social services (18%) and Education and
Training (18%), followed by Cultural Heritage and Tourism (11%).


3. Findings

3.1 Before and after the pandemic: availability of online internships
offers

    Of the 29 respondent companies, only 3 (10%) had offered online
internships before the pandemic. After the experience, 17 (58%) declared to
plan an online internship for the future. Among the 14 organisations providing
remote internships only after the pandemic emergency, 7 belong to the services
sector (company consultancy, including marketing, IT, and project
management), 3 to social services, of which 1 public company, and 4 to
education and training (2 on education and 2 on training). The reason for
offering more online opportunities is mostly related to the availability of
previous experience during the pandemic, which allows inserting online interns
easily. However, it applies to specific profiles or specific tasks. In the
consultancy sector, it generally appears that the online internship is perceived
as an advantage and does not affect the effectiveness of the intern’s work. On
the contrary, e.g., in social services, some tasks would benefit from online work


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(for example, database update and reports writing), and others would require
necessary physical presence (for example, meeting patients’ families).
    Out of the 10 universities represented by respondents (academic supervisors
and career officers), 2 offered some online internships before the pandemic;
after the experience, all consulted universities declared to offer online
internships since the end of the lockdown and to plan them for the future.

3.2 Type of internship

   Table 2 highlights the type of online experience carried out during the
pandemic (not applicable to company supervisors, even if some information
about a blended experience was mentioned by one of the companies in the
programme’s description):

Table 2 - Type of internship

 Type of internship            Interns        Career            Academic S.        Total
                                              officers
 Fully online                       16               4                  8              27
 Hybrid (partially online)          1                0                  0               1
 Replacement programmes              3               8                 11              22

    Replacement programmes, e.g., learning programmes providing university
credits as a replacement for the compulsory credits for the internships, included:
 Short research essay writing.
 Career development programmes or other forms of career development
    (e.g., workshops, seminars).
 Webinar series or learning courses.
    Also, considering constraints to mobility during both the lockdown and the
following months, blended programmes were not considered as such (the only
respondent concluded online an internship regularly started), even if mentioned
by one of the respondents:
    Q.C.19 (Public Administration) “The internships in our company took place
both in-person and electronically because, as an essential service, we have
never closed down, and we have always been open to users”.

3.3 Identified challenges

   Overall, the experience was positive for most respondents from all the
represented targets. Significant challenges are summarised in Table 3.



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Table 3 - Challenges of online internships

 Challenge                             Interns        Career    Ac. Sup.   Co. Sup.    Total
                                                      Officer
 Business culture, company                   0          0          0          4         4
 functioning
 Organisation (between intern and            2          0          0          4         6
 the company)
 Time management, life-work                  5          0          0          0         5
 balance
 Internet connection or equipment            3          0          0          1         4
 Communication                               1          0          0          1         2
 Motivation (keep doing)                     2          0          0          0         2
 Feeling of loneliness                       1          0          0          0         1
 Less significant learning                   1          1          0          0         1
 experience (than F2F)
 Monitoring and recording of                 0          2          1          0         3
 attendance
 Complex coordination between                1          1          1          0         3
 involved players
 Difficulties in finding places              0          3          0          0         3
 Difficulties in exchanging                  0          0          0          1         1
 physical material
 Hardly applicable to some fields            1          0          3          2         6

    Furthermore, three interns report general distress due to the pandemic and
mobility constraints, which cannot directly relate to the internship experience.
    Two of the interns assessed the experience negatively, but they were in a
replacement programme; therefore, there was, in fact, no internship. Also, they
claimed the critical the daily organisation, which was not well-designed; in
these cases, however, the internship started F2F, then shifted online, which
might explain why the experience design was inaccurate.
    Most supervisors, either academic or in-company, were positive about the
experience. Still, a few stressed the need to have F2F work in some specific
fields or sectors – e.g., those using laboratories or those dealing with users, also
disadvantaged, such as, for example, in social work. This point was also
recalled by the two interviewed academic supervisors, one referring to social
work, the other working in the STEM field.
    Interviewed interns and company supervisors confirmed the above scenario:
while interns identified time management and self-organisation as the main
challenges, the companies pointed out the communication and organisation of
distance work as the main difficulty.
    Concerning monitoring and administrative procedures, none of the
respondents (either in the questionnaire or in interviews) pointed out difficulties
or disadvantages: some interns mentioned, although not as a complaint, the

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need for more frequent monitoring conversations with the academic
supervisors.

3.4 Advantages and added value

   Table 4 summarises the main advantages identified by respondents.
Table 4 - Advantages of online internships

 Advantage                              Interns   Career o.     Ac. S.    Co. S.      Total
 Flexibility and autonomy                  2         1            1         2          6
 Reduced costs                             2         0            0         1          3
 Effective learning                        1         0            0         0          1
 Easiness to work from home                1         0            0         0          1
 Skills acquisition                        2         0            1         1          4
 Awareness of the world of work            0         0            1         2          3
 Online relation reduces relational        1         0            0         0          1
 difficulties

    Also, in this case, the interviewees confirmed the above picture. One of the
interns stated that she “would not have done this type of internship if F2F, as
the company was based in another town; it would have been unaffordable”
(I.I.2). The two interviewed interns also reflected on the acquisition of
transversal and soft skills, such as time-management, self-organisation, and
problem-solving, less on the links between theory and practices. This reflection
was not the focus of the academic supervisors. They referred more to the
acquisition of hard skills and the impossibility of performing practical tasks (the
latter applies to the respondent working in the STEM field).
    Both consulted company supervisors, although recognising that the online
internship allows greater flexibility, pointed out that the experience success also
depends on the type of sector and job position of the interns.


4. Discussion and conclusions

    The data collection provided an overview, although partial, of the reaction
of the universities and their business partners to the emergency state due to the
pandemic concerning internships.
    The first relevant outcome of the analysis reveals that the online or
blended/hybrid internship was not at all common across the respondents, either
universities or companies. However, after the pandemic experience, most
companies and universities also decided to offer this learning opportunity.
Several universities could not provide a complete online internship in a short

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time because of the scarcity of places and limited time to invest. The lockdown
started at the beginning of the second academic semester of 2020, which is
usually the internship semester for students in the third year of their Bachelor’s
or second year of their Master’s degrees. Almost half of the institutions
consulted offered replacement programmes, such as short learning courses,
project works or another type of internal learning offer that engages the student
with business, such as consultancy projects or business simulation). There is,
however, no evidence of strategic thinking: among respondents, one comment
refers clearly to ‘making sense of the gained experience’; no word relates to the
changing labour market or the additional skills potentially provided by online
or blended experiences. Little reflection about the pedagogical value of the
experience emerged from the data.
    A second point concerns the administrative procedures, which were not
surprisingly an issue for the consulted targets. Career offices, in particular, do
not highlight any significant revision of the primary process, which was
regularly carried out with minor adjustments (e.g., in attendance recording).
Channels and frequency of monitoring are the most apparent modification from
the normal process.
    A third point is analysing the respondents' advantages and disadvantages.
Results confirm what can be intuitively guessed: the most significant benefits
are flexibility of time, increased autonomy and reduction of costs, while the
intern and the supervisors differently perceive the disadvantages – the first
focused on personal struggles such as time management and self-organisation,
the second more on organisational issues, communication and lack of business
culture acquisition. Generally, the impression is that online internships were
considered by the involved people as temporary experiences and consequently
poorly embedded into the normal processes.
    Against these results, it should instead be considered the impact of the
pandemic on work organisation and consequently on the skills required by the
labour market. This shift requires a deeper reflection on the educational value
of online or hybrid internships more than on the organisational features of the
process. Work-based learning experiences are intended to bring added value to
content learning by stimulating and making evident relations between theory
and practice, but also to support students’ employability by promoting and
making clear the connection between education and work. The internship's
value does not change if it takes place over the internet and through digital
tools. However, it adds some specific requirements to higher education
institutions. The most obvious is related to “the online” itself: the intern should
be digitally competent, following the definition of citizenship in the digital era




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of the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.22) to take full
advantage of the opportunity. It is also essential that relations between interns
and supervisors, particularly academic supervisors, are planned and structured
to promote interns' self-reflection and sense-making of the experience for
learning and personal/professional growth. Finally, an in-depth discussion
should take place at the degree level on expected learning outcomes: all
internships may include a part of a hybrid or blended work; not all internships
can be fully online. Although limited in size and scope, collected data showed
some major issues in tasks requiring physical action – such as, as reported by
an academic supervisor, ‘practising with pipettes and reagents in a chemical
lab’. On the company side, the sample does not sufficiently cover sectors to
provide relevant data on the potential of online work-based learning. However,
organisations that adopted remote internships after the pandemic experience
were mostly in the Services sector. Further work is needed to understand how
it can work in other fields, such as manufacturing, which is relevant to the
Italian economy.
    Based on these initial results and considerations and consultations with
university professionals, the ON-IT consortium worked toward the definition
of a proposal for a process ensuring quality online and blended internships in
higher education, both for learning outcomes achievement and to support
students' employability. The piloting of the proposed approach is running in the
field of Tourism at the time of writing. Further research data will be available
after the end of that phase.

Acknowledgements: This work received funding from the European Union’s
Erasmus+ Programme under Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of
good practices – KA226 - Partnership for Digital Education Readiness, grant
agreement No. 2020-1-IT02-KA226-HE-095091 (ON-IT Online Internship in
Tourism). The content of this article does not reflect the official opinion of the
European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed in the
article lies entirely with the authors.

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