COMPREHENSIVE SOFTWARE SOLUTION FOR INTERNSHIPS MANAGEMENT
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Description |
The Comprehensive Software Solution for Internships Management (GIPE) is a powerful tool to manage the complex framework of external academic internships, both curricular and extracurricular. It covers all phases of the internship management process, carrying out, among many other functions, the following:
- Management of agreements: registration of collaborating entities, generation of agreements according to the university's templates, submission and file management in an integrated database.
- Pre-registration and admission of students, in the case of electives courses.
- Publication of the internship’ offers of the collaborating entities (previously validated by the responsible person).
- Assignment of the student to a specific internship (with the possibility of choosing between different types of selection processes, as adopted in each degree), with designation of the academic tutor and the tutor of the collaborating entity. Generation of documentation (Student Annex) according to the University’s template.
- Reports for students over 28 years of age in relation to the contracting of accident insurance.
- Individualized monitoring of the internship, with the participation of the student, the academic tutor and the tutor of the collaborating entity (with an alarm system to communicate delays in the delivery of the monitoring assignments)
- Generation of reports from the evaluation’s data.
- Certification of the internship and generation of the Certificates of External Tutor.
At present, the application is being used in all the faculties of the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as in the Office of Internships and Employment (OPE), in charge of extracurricular practices. It manages approximately 15,000 student internships a year and has a database of about 18,000 agreements with different types of collaborating entities. It is also used at the University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH) to manage their curricular and extracurricular internships.
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How does it work |
The platform is hosted on the Complutense's own servers. It incorporates the different phases that have to be carried out in the management of internships. It provides, as well, a differentiated access with a user management system for the different actors that participate in the process: administrative and academic managers (https://gipe.ucm.es/admin), as well as students (https://gipe.ucm.es) and collaborating entities (https://gipe.ucm.es/empresas).
The program has been developed in PHP and works with the Apache web server. It is a fully customizable platform for other educational institutions and was designed in a very flexible way, with countless configuration options that facilitated the adaptation to the peculiarities of internships management of the different centers of a university as large as the UCM.
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Advantages |
The adoption of GIPE in institutions allows the digitalization and automation of the management of student internships, which results in the achievement of more efficient, agile and less bureaucratic environments
Some of the more relevant advantages derived from its adoption are:
- GIPE facilitates the adoption of objective criteria for assigning internships and tutors to students.
- It allows the generation of valid criteria to collaborate and select entities that offer internships posts, based on the available information provided by the different parties involved.
- It integrates, through the generation of indicators, the evaluation of practices in the Quality Assurance Systems of the degrees, as well as in the monitoring yearly reports of the different degrees.
- With its continuing use, GIPE generates a database to show the "history" of collaboration between companies and institutions and the university, which result in better coordination between those who are responsible for the internship management in faculties and external entities.
- It allows detecting students (within the university's job placement surveys) who have been hired by the collaborating entities after having carried out their internships in such workplaces.
- It improves the image that the collaborating entities have of the university and facilitates contacts between academic tutors and internal tutors.
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Where has it been developed |
The idea of developing an application to manage student internships was materialized for the first time through an Educational Innovation Project granted to Professor Lucila Finkel in 2011, which continued with another project in 2013. In order to improve the complex management of an activity of vital importance for students, the author, together with Zacarías Martín, a computer scientist in the academic management area of the UCM, began to jointly design and develop their own Software Solution for Internships Management called GIPE in Spanish.
GIPE was used for the first time in the 2012-13 academic year at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology, and steadily, it spread to the rest of the UCM faculties, incorporating new functionalities and parameterization options. Currently, with almost ten years of history, it is the reference computer solution of the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Alcalá de Henares.
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And also |
GIPE is in constant development. It grows by incorporating new functionalities, there are different training courses available, it has tutorial videos, and a series of informative bulletins that allow the user to become familiar with different options and procedures in a very didactic way are regularly published.
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Contact |
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© Office for the Transfer of Research Results – UCM |
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PDF Downloads |
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Classification |
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Responsible Researcher |
Lucila Finkel Morgenstern: lfinkel@cps.ucm.es
Department: Sociology: Methodology and Theory
Faculty: Political Sciences and Sociology