When work integrated education (WIE) is discussed, the archetypal examples of supervised placements for medical, nursing, physiotherapy, and teacher education students are usually referenced. They comprise students engaging in authentic work activities and interactions, closely supervised by qualified and more experienced practitioners. Ideally, those supervisors identify and select students’ work activities and support and guide their engagement and learning. These arrangements often arise from long-standing occupational traditions of care and responsibility towards patients and students and have legislated arrangements demanding such supervision.

However, for many occupations such traditions do not exist and, where they exist, placements are less structured. Moreover, the ability to provide placements are restricted by the size of the enterprise, the work undertaken and/or the number of students seeking these experiences. One deputy vice chancellor quipped “how can I provide supervised placements for 1500 undergraduate business students each semester?”. A good question.

So, in seeking to provide WIE experiences across all occupational fields, it is not possible for many of the courses in which our students are enrolled. The educational challenge is, therefore, to identify how these students can come to experience, engage, and develop occupational understandings, procedures and dispositions (i.e., to think and act like practitioners). Hence, we need to find alternatives to provide these experiences. In the response to the quip above, it was suggested, for instance, that most undergraduate students engage in paid part-time work that provide experiences to assist understand many aspects of business practices. That is, processes of recruitment, supervision, customer interaction, stock provisions and organisation, financial processes and supervision. Engaging students in sharing, comparing and critiquing these work experiences, can secure insights from peers’ experiences and provide access to students who do not work part-time.

Such alternatives might include students being workplace visitors able to observe and engage in some tasks, or interviewing practitioners to understand what constitutes their work, and is central to its enactment. Law students might attend court proceedings to understand those processes, finance students engaging in auditing of not-for-profit organisations’ accounts, or projects required the kinds of thinking and acting of practitioners. This kind of approach has been long rehearsed within faculties of engineering, creative arts etc. So, we can identify and use these kinds of experiences. But what if the students are dispersed around the world? The web based “Webmaster” program at University West faced this problem. Moreover, these students are in different stages of life, often having to balance work, family and study commitments. We have found that providing these students with glimpses of work practices offers an alternative to workplace visits.

Moreover, the field of “web” is marked by openness and sharing, and videos on, for example, YouTube providing insights into workplace activities are abundant. A search for “A day in the life of an UX designer”, for instance, generates hundreds of video suggestions and in courses relating to that topic, students are provided with a list to view and then engage in discussions about them. Through using these kinds of materials, students gain insights into different work practices. Other alternatives have included engaging business representatives as guest lecturers, but with our students located across time zones this can be an option that is time-restricted. A “flipped” guest lecture or workshop is provided to campus-based students, and “re-enacted” by students in the Webmaster program, supervised by teachers.

Moreover, as occupational practices are increasingly mediated by and through electronic technology, the need to engage in the physical and social environment of workplaces becomes less important. Alternatives not requiring physical presence in work sites can ease the demand on employers. The key consideration is, instead, for students to gaining access to and engage in the kinds of thinking and acting required for electronically-mediated work activities and interactions. In such contexts, supervised placements are not feasible and less applicable as an effective WIE approach, because future work environments are not necessarily place-based.

The challenge we face includes preparing students for diverse work contexts. Remote work, nomadic work practices and gig-based work are becoming common, and these may or may not represent possible future work contexts for our students. We also aim to explore different forms of “one-to-many” engagements (Dean & Campbell, 2020), where, for example, enterprises can provide video-challenges, i.e., examples of problems they are currently facing, and engage groups of students in seeking to respond to these problems, while being supervised by teachers.

Such short bursts of intense and focused WIE would benefit both our students and partner enterprises and serve to strengthen student employability.

This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of applying a Work-integrated learning (WIL) perspective to distance learning programs in higher education. More specifically, it disseminates the Work-integrated education (WIE) elements incorporated in the 2-year program ”Webmaster” at University West, Sweden, with about 100 students each year.

The program consists of two main themes, web programming and graphic- and user experience (UX) design, respectively. A majority of the students live in Sweden, but about 10 percent live abroad. With so many students dispersed around the world, more traditional placement-based WIE activities, such as internships, are challenging to accommodate. Other challenges are that the students are in different stages of life, often having to balance work, family, and study commitments (cf. Dean et al., 2020; Dean & Campbell, 2020). Another factor to consider when implementing WIE activities is that for these students, placement-based WIL is not necessarily preparing them for a future in the web industry. While more traditional work settings are common, more novel forms of work, such as work-from-home, nomadic work practices, and gig-based work, are increasingly common. Hence, a traditional placement-based WIE activity would not suffice to prepare students for work in the industry.

So, given the heterogenic nature of the student group regarding their demographics, their purpose and ambitions, physical location and uncertain future work contexts, taking in a WIL perspective is challenging at the same time as it is presenting us with the opportunity to explore alternative non-placement forms of WIL.

In this paper we explore the students’ attitudes towards and impressions of the implementation of three forms of non-placement WIL:i) ”WIL glimpses” features a series of curated (by the lecturer) resources already freely and readily available on the internet, in which people in the industry share glimpses from their workdays,ii) ”follow-along workshops” in which we have contracted experienced guest lecturers to conduct workshops with students on campus-based courses and filmed these sessions for use as follow-along workshops for the online students,iii) a series of ”Alumni interviews”, where former students are interviewed about their careers after graduating, the process of obtaining an income in the industry, their typical workday, and what competencies are sought after in the industry.

The findings suggests that, despite none of these elements being mandatory in the various courses in the program, they are appreciated by the students as well as by the guest lecturers and alumni that take part. Thus, the elements contribute to the students’ readiness (Billet, n.d.).

Taken together, the three elements of WIL provide not only opportunities to incorporate non-placement WIE activities in the program. They have also proved to be a re-usable educational resource, and as such highly valued by the lecturers involved in the program. Hence, we suggest that an innovative way to incorporate WIL in an online education is to offer a series of non-placement glimpses that represents the industry perspectives.

Gunnar Nygren, Östersjöprofessor i journalistik vid Södertörns högskola, gick i februari 2020 i pension. Gunnar är en person som skapar engagemang kring viktiga frågor, driver på journalistisk förändring, och lyfter människor både i den akademiska världen och i mediebranschen. Ett signum för Gunnars forskning är att den uppmärksammar journalistikens samhällsroller på flera olika nivåer, från det hyperlokala till det globala. I denna vänbok beskriver kollegor till Gunnar hur de på olika sätt inspirerats av detta engagemang för journalistikens utveckling. Bokens 21 kapitel är författade av kollegor inom olika delar av akademin, samt av verksamma journalister som Gunnar samverkat med genom åren. Kapitlen kretsar kring fyra teman: Mediepolitik och demokrati; Kris, medieskugga och möjligheter; Gunnar som inspiratör; och Framtidens journalister och fortbildning. Kapitelförfattarna belyser centrala frågor för medieutvecklingen, men också hur Gunnar ‒ både som lärare och forskare ‒ har bidragit till en kritisk och konstruktiv diskussion om journalistikens roll i samhället.

Journalists are among the most frequent users of Twitter, and Twitter has become an important platform for personal branding. Social media logic promotes not only a chase for virality and impressive metrics but also a mix of professional, personal, and private content, as well as sharing, interaction, and dialogue. Focusing one aspect of social media logic, the aim of this study is to analyze how the technological affordances of Twitter shape journalists’ self-branding in their account presentations and whether there are differences between groups of journalists. The study draws on a quantitative content analysis of Swedish journalists’ Twitter presentations and account information (N = 2543). The findings suggest that Swedish journalists on Twitter brand themselves as being more audience oriented, networking, and individualistic, projecting a mixed identity including both professional and personal features, and that social media logic influence journalists’ self-branding.