INTERNational

A solution addressing students needing internships in the current online environment to match students to suitable internships and to support them in the integration into the relevant company/role.

Comment 4

Inspiration

My 2 Spanish friends working in VET (Vocational Education and Training) school expressed the need for clear guidance on how to run the 3 months apprenticeship phase for their students. They said that the teachers' team have defined some projects that students will need to work on and submit at the end of the semester.

The current challenge is that students cannot now physically enter workplaces to complete internships and also have difficulty in accessing appropriate companies and roles. Also, they have additional difficulty with on-boarding in their new role and accessing the relevant company supports. To know more about VET in Europe, please check references (1 to 5)

To understand how many students in Spain for example are probably experiencing this disrupted apprenticeships, please check references (6 and 7)

To see how how teenagers in Ireland (where Learnovate Team is based) see VET skills, please check reference (8)

At the end, the Division Head and coordinator of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment and the OECD Indicators of Education Systems programme, Mr. Andreas Schleicher, says:

"According to the OECD, addressing this challenge requires ensuring effective systems of career guidance combined with a close engagement with the working world."

In the meantime, in Spain, Mr. Andreas Schleicher was interviewed (9) recently regarding how this covid-19 crisis is going to impact our educational systems

See at the very end of the interview, he commented:

"Educational innovation requires collaboration between the public and the private, and in Spain there is a culture of confrontation between the public and the private. It seems that education is only a matter for the Government and society needs to get involved and contribute creative ideas. Companies also have to take sides and propose solutions, for example, for the apprenticeships of Vocational Educational Training students. The country's future depends on how this educational crisis is managed."

What it does

Bringing internship to an online model for everyone involved:

  • Students going on the VET apprenticeship phase
  • Schools running the VET courses
  • Teachers acting as apprenticeship mentors from school side
  • Company mentors
  • Government educational policy makers

Not only does it match students with suitable internships at relevant companies, but it supports the student througout the internship through onboarding with the company, an online journal to document the process and learnings, commenting and calendar functions for tutors to support interns at all stages of the process, and the chance for students to provide feedback to the tutor at the end of the internship. Thus, our solution addresses our specific user needs, which we validated at each step of our process with a VET tutor in Spain.

How I built it

Our solution is web-based platform that will allow students, tutors and companies go through the journey of an apprenticeship in a successful and playful way. The platform would be built as a MEAN Stack to allow rapid development, high performance and scalability. These are the tools we used:

  • Front end: Angular, a open source web application framework based on Typescript that allows us to create our platform and make it available through a web browser.
  • Back end: Node.js and Express. These tools together allow us to create a RESTful API to handle the data and communicate Angular with the database.
  • Database: MongoDB, a NoSQL database that works with JSON documents
  • Hosting: Amazon Web Services. The architecture can run on any cloud platform in US and Europe.

Prototype

Challenges I ran into

  • Time was always a challenge!
  • Pitching video - much more difficult to create than we had envisioned and to keep it under 2 mins

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Collaboration: we worked really well together as a team and divided up our roles and responsibilities
  • Communication: through Slack and Jitsi we met regularly for updates and to address issues and challenges
  • The final product: it addresses specific user needs while not being innovative for innovation sake

What I learned

  • Never underestimate how long it will take to make a pitching video!
  • Break each day down by task and set aside time for breaks
  • Ensure everyone knows what they need to do and when
  • Enjoy the process - we are all learning!

What's next for INTERNational

  • Further research and validation on our proposed solution with potential customers and users.

  • Be part of a bigger project in the next few years to hold continuity on educational programs when they get disrupted by crises like covid-19.

References

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