Evaluate risks for internships during Covid-19

Universities have been working overtime to respond to the developing Covid-19 outbreak. Many put protections into place for their Faculty, Students, and Staff in an effort to safely hold in-person classes. Others opted instead to move all classes online or adopt a mixed schedule. However, there’s one group of courses that aren’t on-campus and can’t always be held virtually—experiential learning courses. Perhaps for some students these experiences have become virtual, but in many disciplines these courses still require in-person, hands-on learning. For students enrolled in internships, field experiences, clinicals, practica, and the like, how can universities make informed decisions about the risks for those students, and avoid placing students at imprudent risk?

Brown Book Software provides a cloud-hosted software platform to track, approve, and manage experiential learning in higher education. Our product, the Experiential Learning Inventory, provides a central repository for experiential learning enrollments so that universities can know which students are in the field and where they are working.

A large research university in eastern North Carolina, has leveraged data from Experiential Learning Inventory to create a dashboard of Covid-19 exposure risk and use that information to make informed decisions about the risks students were being exposed to. Taking the location data for their students from the Experiential Learning Inventory and combining Covid-19 case counts per zip-code allowed the university to create a risk assessment for every individual student intern based on the zip code in which they are working. Staff and administrators could then evaluate which students were at the highest and lowest risk as new Covid-19 cases were reported by health authorities.

The university used the combined Experiential Learning Inventory and case count information to make better informed, individualized risk assessments, and then took action where needed. The result was increased student safety and a confidence on the part of administrators that no student was working in an excessively risky environment. Unfortunately, this did mean that some students in high-risk areas had their internships canceled. The university is working with those students to find them new opportunities or allow them to continue in a later semester.

Could your university or college make location-based risk assessments for every experiential learning student on short notice? It all begins with having a central, trusted repository of information on every internship, field study, clinical, practicum, student teaching, and study abroad student. Tracking location information for these placements is already necessary for handling important regulations like State Authorization—now the Covid-19 outbreak has made it even more vital. Contact Brown Book Software and let us show you how the Experiential Learning Inventory can give you the confidence that comes with knowing every student’s location.