Last updated on November 8th, 2021 at 01:38 pm

Indira Gandhi National Open University aka IGNOU has released the guidelines of online internships for those who get enrolled in the second year of MA psychology/third year of BDP-BA (Psychology), before or during January 2021. 

The university is helping psychology students in getting online internships amidst the covid-19 situation. This initiative has been taken to help students in getting internships even at the time of the pandemic because it was quite difficult to do regular internships. 

The discipline of Psychology of IGNOU is providing an option to do online internships to those who have registered for the final year before or after January 2021 (who paid the fees or registered for the final year by January 2021). 

Students are required to send the proposal via email to internship@ignou.ac.in and your proposals will then be scrutinised by faculty members. Also, make sure that you submit your proposal a week before the internship starts and you will start the internship after the approval from the Discipline of Psychology. 

Guidelines regarding the selection in online internship

– The online internship needs to be offered by an organisation already offering psychological services.

– The organisation offering the online internship needs to have a proper website and brochure with the help of which the Discipline can authenticate the internship.

– The structure of the internship needs to be as per the specialisation of the learner.

– The online internship needs to provide enough scope for activities (including case studies, role plays, group discussions, psychological tests, exercises etc.) that the learner needs to carry out and the content needs to reflect the same. It should not be just theoretical information that can be learnt through other sources.

– Duration of actual online sessions: The duration of actual online sessions will be a minimum of 120 hours for MA – Psychology and 60 hours for BDP-BA Psychology. The overall duration of the internship remains 240 study hours for MA Psychology and 120 hours for BDP-BA Psychology and besides the online sessions, the rest of the study hours can be covered in terms of activities (including case study, role plays, group discussions, psychological tests, exercises etc.) and report writing etc.

– The organisation offering an online internship needs to provide the learner with an agency supervisor who is a psychologist (refer to the criteria in the Handbook of Internship). For an online internship in MPCE015, the agency supervisor needs to be an RCI registered Clinical psychologist.

– The internship needs to be carried out only in one organisation.

Note: The Discipline of Psychology is not offering online internships on its own or has not endorsed any organization for the same. The learners need to submit their proposals for online internships and the faculty will scrutinize the proposals and will then inform the status. This is a temporary provision and students who will take admission in the batches after January 2021 will not come under this.