E-Learning Community Stage Rechtsgeleerdheid

Contactpersoon

J.J. Dijkstra. j.j.dijkstra rug.nl

Samenvatting

De NSE-enquête geeft aan dat extra ondersteuning bij de loopbaanbegeleiding richting de arbeidsmarkt zal voorzien in een behoefte bij de studenten. Voor een aanzienlijk deel van de studenten vormt de stage een belangrijke oriëntatie op hun verdere loopbaan. Deze oriëntatie wordt door het afnemend beroepenveld en door recruiters gezien als een meerwaarde in het selectieproces voor een vacature ( employability).

De Faculteit wil daarom het lopen van stages dan ook stimuleren door middel van een learning community voor stagelopers. Het leerrendement van een stage zou aanzienlijk kunnen worden verhoogd indien studenten beter nadenken over de keuze van een stage en hun leerdoelen en van elkaars ervaringen kunnen leren. Daar kan deze learning community toe bijdragen. Bovendien ondervangt de community het probleem dat studenten tijdens hun stage geen onderdeel uitmaken van de facultaire leeromgeving. Vandaar dat de Faculteit voor een e-learning community heeft gekozen. De faculteit wil zich op het gebied van career service meer gaan profileren en haar aanbod verbeteren en uitbreiden. Deze e-learning-community zou een onderdeel van de career services binnen de faculteit Rechtsgeleerdheid kunnen zijn die het leer-effect van een stage vergroot.

Best Practices

Online information: All internship information has been reordered and made more visible and available on different locations as part of the e-learning community. We have developed a new internship website, which includes a career development decision making model. You can see this on http://www.rug.nl/rechten/careers-services/students/stage/. This website is supported by two Nestor communities; The first is the orientation community, where students can find movie clips from students that have already done an internship. This website, the communities and the movie clips are regularly visited and watched. In the second community, which is for students currently doing exchange, students can find information on preferred behavior during the internship, the internship report and follow online lectures of courses they missed due to the internship.

Students can use the available career model for themselves online. This model has a clear added value during the career coaching meetings with the internship coordinator and teach students something about their competences and career goals. Additionally, the number of career coaching meetings as a preparation for the internship have increased. Students have gotten a stronger community feeling and ask for advice regarding internships more regularly. Student support (Studieadvies) and the info desk are both better informed about the internship information, use the available information in their conversations with students and increasingly refer them to the internship coordinator. Moreover, there has been more communication regarding the employability and the importance of doing an internship as part of the marketing strategy of the community. Students who have done internships in the past increasingly inform current students on information meetings about their experiences. These information sessions have been held in high regard. We can see the community is reacting to the students wish to get more information on internships and career choices

Focus point: Direct exchange of experiences and being able to ask questions in the community during the internship. Students clearly want to learn from each other’s experiences, but are currently not communicating through the communication portals provided on Nestor. Possibly the attention of the students is focused on the surroundings of their internship as opposed to the faculty or their fellow students. We intended to organize ‘live’ gatherings before students would do their internships, which would ideally have led to a community feeling with the students who would all do an internship in the same period. This ‘live’ community feeling is 5 an important condition for creating an online community feeling. However, in practice it appeared that not many students had interest in such meetings. Due to the fact that the time frames in which students do internships differ a lot from each other and therefore, it was not possible to organize meetings with a lot of interested students. Nevertheless, the faculty will continue to offer the possibility to students to meet with each other and the internship coordinator prior to starting an internship because some students do have this wish to learn and share.