E-Learning Community Employability Law

Contact person

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

Summary

The NSE survey indicates that students would appreciate some additional career guidance. Placements are important aids for most students to familiarize themselves with their future career path. The professional field and recruiters consider the experience that students gain during their placement to represent added value in the job selection process (employability).

The Faculty therefore aims to encourage students to go on a placement by establishing a Learning Community for students on placements. The success rates of placements could be significantly improved if students think harder about their choice of placement and their learning goals and if they can learn from each other’s experiences. This Learning Community could contribute to those aims. In addition, the community would solve the problem of students falling outside the Faculty learning environment during their placement. This is why the Faculty has opted for an e-Learning Community. The Faculty would like to improve and expand its range of careers services. This e-Learning Community could serve as a component of the career services offered by the Faculty of Law as it aims to help students learn even more from placements.

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.