UGC’s new guidelines have asked colleges to dedicate at least one full semester to internships and evaluate students on the basis of their internship experience.
Bangalore: Students pursuing regular degree courses such as BA, BCom, BSc, among others, will now be able to undertake internships as part of their course, just like their counterparts in professional courses like engineering and management.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) Friday released the apprenticeship/internship guidelines for degree programmes, under which they have allowed courses from any discipline to offer internships as a part of the programmes. These courses will be called ‘Internship/apprenticeship embedded degree programmes’.
Currently, only students pursuing professional courses like journalism, engineering, management and others are asked to undergo mandatory internships, but the same opportunity is not extended to a student pursuing, for example, BA in English (honours) or BCom (honours).
The UGC guidelines have asked colleges and universities to dedicate at least one full semester to internships and evaluate students on the basis of their internship experience.
The commission has also asked institutes to award 20 per cent of the total credits to the internships if they chose to offer students embedded degree programmes.
Need to modify Academic only approach
According to the guidelines, any degree program will be eligible for an embedded internship/apprenticeship program.
Programs that have an internship as a part of the curriculum will offer a kind of a traineeship, which will be undertaken not on the campus, but on the premises of the workplace where a student is pursuing an internship. It could be a commercial or a non-commercial organization.
The higher education institutes will have to sign a previous Memorandum of Understanding with discipline-specific commercial and non-commercial organizations for giving apprenticeship/internship, before introducing the embedded degree programs. The courses will be scheduled based on the facility and infrastructure available.
Need to modify Academic only approach
According to the guidelines, any degree program will be eligible for an embedded internship/apprenticeship program.
Programs that have an internship as a part of the curriculum will offer a kind of a traineeship, which will be undertaken not on the campus, but on the premises of the workplace where a student is pursuing an internship. It could be a commercial or a non-commercial organization.
The higher education institutes will have to sign a previous Memorandum of Understanding with discipline-specific commercial and non-commercial organizations for giving apprenticeship/internship, before introducing the embedded degree programs. The courses will be scheduled based on the facility and infrastructure available.
The guidelines stated that pupils will be assessed based on their internships and the ultimate scores will reflect in their mark sheets.
Universities will carry out the evaluation along with the organization, which is offering the internships. For example, if a student is interning with a media organization, editors in the organization will give a certificate to the student and it will be a part of the student’s final outcome.
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