ON-IT Online Internships In Tourism

ON-IT ' Online internship in Europe' focuses on the development of reference guidelines, procedures, tools, and resources to design and implement meaningful remote internships in higher education. Together with guidance tools and guidelines, the project also intends to develop relevant materials for all the targets involved - students, university teachers and tutors, administrative / management staff and company tutors. 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 labor market shaped by digital transformation. As piloting action. ON-IT focuses the tourism field and aims at providing outputs easily transferable to all fields. However, the ON-IT project aims at providing results that can be easily transferred to any other field.

The project aims at developing reference procedures and guidelines on how to provide effective online work-based learning experiences, namely internships and traineeships. To achieve the objective, ON-IT have four intellectual outputs.

Mapping of existent practices from EU institutions and identify common and divergent provisions for university teachers supervising virtual internship, students having completed online internships, university internship office or career centre administrators and company tutors or supervisors in charge of overseeing the trainees.

Guidelines, as a reference document to organize and successfully carry out effective online internship and traineeships. The Guidelines will consider the system that allows deployment of internship, therefore together with pedagogical elements, practical and administrative issues will be included.

The aim is to design a piloting phase in order to test the guidelines and provide real remote internship case studies completed with short videos from interns and hosting companies, on the internship experience.

The first aim is to design and develop learning resources and learning opportunities (webinars, short courses, workshops) for all target groups involved - administrative / management staff, teachers / tutors (including company tutors) and higher education students. The second aim is to provide resources and guidance to higher education students in order to support online internship and how to deal with remote working.

• Improvements in work-based learning offer of higher education institutions.
• Enhanced quality in equipping higher education students with employability skills, related particularly to remote working.
• Increased integration among the academic body and support services.
• Enhanced capacity to embed the world of work into academic curricula.
• Advance and harmonize European policies in higher education.

The project is implemented by a consortium composed by

• Università degli Studi di Macerata, Italy (The coordinator)
• Universidad of La Laguna, Spain
• Jamk University of Applied Sciences, Finland
• Montpellier Business School, France
• University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Croatia
• UNIMED Mediterranean Universities Union, Italy
• IGCAT International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, Arts and Tourism, Spain

ON-IT Project is funded by the Erasmus Plus Programme of the European Union.

During the period March 2021 - February 2023

Project Manager

Karoliina Väisänen