Integrating virtual internships into online classrooms

With the rapid increase in the number of online enrollments, educators are faced with the challenge of ensuring on-campus experiences are available to distant students, which meet quality and accessibility expectations. One of the biggest challenges with online courses is constructing meaningful group projects for part-time students who can be in disparate time zones. As part of our Master's biotechnology programme, offered completely online, we have developed a capstone course for students approaching graduation, which integrates a semester-long project working with a small biotechnology company in the DC metro area into the course curriculum. The experience and results from these projects have been well received by the participating students and companies. We describe some of the challenges we have faced, strategies we have developed, and ongoing modifications to the programme to integrate projects with small biotechnology businesses into the online classroom.