(452)ASSESSMENT OF UNIVERSITY EXTERNAL INTERNSHIPS.TOWARDS A MIXED MODEL FOR MEASURING THE ACQUISITIONOF SKILLS AND THE SATISFACTION OF PARTIES INVOLVED

摘要

The continuous improvement of management and assessment processes for curricular externalinternships has led a group of university teachers specialised in this area to develop a mixed model ofmeasurement that combines the verification of skill acquisition by those students choosing externalinternships with the satisfaction of the parties involved in that process. They included academics,educational tutors of companies and organisations and administration and services personnel in thelatter category.The experience, developed within University of Alicante, has been carried out in the degrees ofBusiness Administration and Management, Business Studies, Economics, Advertising and PublicRelations, Sociology and Social Work, all part of the Faculty of Economics and Business. By designingand managing closed standardised interviews and other research tools, validated outside the centre, asystem of continuous improvement and quality assurance has been created, clearly contributing to thegradual increase in the number of students with internships in this Faculty, as well as to theimprovement in satisfaction, efficiency and efficacy indicators at a global level.As this experience of educational innovation has shown, the acquisition of curricular knowledge, skills,abilities and competences by the students is directly correlated with the satisfaction of those partiesinvolved in a process that takes the student beyond the physical borders of a university campus.Ensuring the latter is a task made easier by the implementation of a mixed assessment method,combining continuous and final assessment, and characterised by its rigorousness and simplemanagement.This report presents that model, subject in turn to a persistent and continuous control, a model allparties involved in the external internships are taking part of. Its short-term results imply an increase,estimated at 15% for the last course, in the number of students choosing curricular internships and, forthe medium and long-term, a major interweaving between the academic world and its social andproductive environment, both in the business and institutional areas.The potentiality of this assessment model does not lie only in the quality of its measurement tools, butalso in the effects from its use in the various groups and in the actions that are carried out as a resultof its implementation and which, without any doubt and as it is shown below, are the real guarantee ofa continuous improvement.