When “Immersive” Learning Goes Remote: Interdisciplinary Lessons Learned in a Pandemic

Background: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, health professional training programs made substantial changes to shift previously in-person student training opportunities to remote settings. Objectives: We present lessons learned from changes made to one community-engaged internship program, Bridging the Gaps (BTG)-Pittsburgh, that should prove helpful in future times of crisis. Methods: BTG-Pittsburgh places inter-disciplinary graduate pairs of students in community-based organizations that serve marginalized populations, to work directly with program participants and develop tangible products aimed to build organizational capacity. Students get additional training on poverty awareness, health literacy, community violence, food justice, trauma-informed self-care, cultural and academic humility, oral health and advocacy. Upon pandemic onset, given increased community need and community partner feedback, BTG-Pittsburgh pivoted quickly, shifting to remote engagement and making critical adjustments to ensure responsiveness to student and community partner needs. Adjustments included: 1) adopting a traumainformed approach, 2) developing remote mentoring guidance, and 3) doubling site visits to ensure that students and site mentors felt sufficiently supported. Conclusions: Several program and partnership attributes contributed to our overall program success, including a model of reciprocal benefits, providing supports, flexibility, and long-standing relationships. The university’s quick adoption of remote technology and each participating school’s commitment to supporting the program model, further enabled effective student-organization-program collaboration. These lessons can inform community-partnered experiential learning programs that may need to incorporate remote components moving forward.